MRC CTU director Mahesh Parmar in Nature podcast: trials on trial

19 Jun 2014

The MRC CTU's Director Mahesh Parmar has featured in a recent edition of Nature’s popular series of podcasts.

The weekly shows provide more detail on articles from each week’s journal, including interviews with people linked to the stories. In the 29 September edition, Mahesh was interviewed in a segment called ‘Trials on trial’. He talks about the current state of clinical trials, including the achievements made so far and the challenges that remain, particularly with regard to the time taken from an idea for a new therapy to the trial’s results being implemented into clinical practice (up to 17 years).

He also comments that more creativity and flexibility in trial design could reduce this interval. The concept of ‘adaptive trials’, which can change design as the trial progresses, is suggested as one approach to improve the situation.  The MRC CTU’s STAMPEDE trial is a good example of one such adaptive design.

The podcast follows an article in that week’s edition of Nature entitled ‘Translational research: 4 ways to fix the clinical trial’.

Both the podcast and the article are available from Nature podcasts.