Unit 1 - Clinical Trial

Drugs affect our body chemistry and are used in a variety of different ways to help healing - painkillers, antibiotics, vaccines and so on. When new drugs are developed they need to be tested prior to medical use in humans, and seeing how this is done is one part of GCSE Biology. Clinical trials involve the large scale testing of drugs on volunteers and provide essential information about their safety and efficacy (how effectively they work). During clinical trials, the volunteers are monitored closely and any side effects can be discovered too.

Clinical trials need to be carried out under carefully controlled conditions in order not to come to the wrong conclusions and jeopardise patients' safety. In a blind trial, the best method of testing, the patients do not know whether they are being given the drug or a placebo. A placebo is something that looks like the drug but actually contains no active ingredients. In some trials, neither the doctors nor the patients know who has taken what until the trial is over. This is a very good way of filtering out any errors.