Question: Do you remember a few years ago when there was this human trial for a cancer cure that went horribly wrong, if you do remember then what are your thoughts on the whole incident and is there anything that could've been avoided?

Fiona Scott answered on 12 Mar 2019: last edited 12 Mar 2019 11:42 am

I wasn’t following drug trials particularly closely a few years ago. We learn lessons from every failed drug trial. Increasingly researchers are taking a more cautious approach to drug development before putting them into patients. The chemical probes I’m helping develop will help biologists be sure that they are shutting down only one particular kinase.

The reality is its very hard to check everything before a drug goes into patients but we do as much as we can. My drugs have been tested against over 400 different kinase enzymes, but there are in fact about 40,000 different enzymes including kinases. It would take a huge amount of time to test against every individual enzyme – we don’t have the technology to do that yet – and even then the combination of cells a whole human is hard to model in a lab environment.

People are working on developing such models though and this is why we use animal testing. Mice have similar, but not identical, anatomy to ours. Unfortunately this means even if a drug is shown to work “perfectly” in mice, there may be something different in human anatomy that causes a side effect.

People who take part in clinical trials are aware of this when they sign up and are paid compensation if it does go wrong. Trials are also halted immediately when it becomes clear a drug is not doing what its supposed to do.

We likely have better technology these days that allows us to check more things before putting drugs into humans but even then, the vast majority of clinical trials are stopped for one reason or another. Drug discovery is very difficult.