I will be speaking about clinical trials and signing copies of Chasing Medical Miracles at the Tucson Festival of Books next Saturday, March 13. The Festival, now only in its second year, is a fantastic event for anyone interested in books. More than 400 authors will speak, present, sign books, and be available to answer questions and talk. As I did last year I am presenting at the Festival with Dr. Allan Hamilton, author of the Scalpel and the Soul, an inspirational memoir about his experiences as a neurosurgeon.

The presentation is Medicine: the Miracle of Science and the Science of Miracles on Saturday at 1:00 pm – 02:00 pm in the Koffler Builindg on the University of Arizona Campus, room 204.

I look forward to meeting you there or at the signing afterward!

Whether the movie’s views about research and money are wholly accurate is beside the point. It does signal that the clinical trials system is facing an image issue – one that CROs as an industry and university researchers as a group might want to be aware of as the business of research continues to grow at at impressive rate while other sectors of the economy tank.

The government in India is considering a system by which subjects enrolled in clinical trials would be assigned biometric identification. The move is designed to cut down on abuses and ensure the data coming out of the decade-old clinical trials industry in India is accurate. It should also help make trials safer for the subjects. A biometric ID is akin to an iris scan or fingerprint and is next to impossible to fake. The idea is a compelling one for a country that is also making registration of CROs and clinical trials mandatory. Perhaps other developing countries seeking to build a credible clinical trials industry will follow this lead and take similar steps.

In other clinical trials news…

This is definitely a glass half empty/glass half full thing. A report in the Chronicle of Higher Education reveals that five years after a consortium of medical journal editors asked for the pre-registration of clinical trials at their outset less than 50 percent of trials are registering properly so that they can be reviewed and their results scrutinized and journals are lax in insisting upon the practice. Now comes the glass half full part: The editor in chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association says that before the request for registration the number of trials that would have registered would have been “zero.” The editor sites the study results as real progress in getting compliance and full disclosure in trials results. There’s no word on what if any steps will be taken to ensure a higher or increased rate of compliance in the future… in other news, the swine flu vaccine keeps marching on and the number of trial in India grows by huge rates…