Contract Research Organizations/Pharmaceutical Companies

Money can be saved and accuracy can be increased in drug trials by replacing expensive batteries of psychological tests with quantitative results from imaging studies. Contract Research Organizations & Pharmaceutical companies have already begun to use these measurements as surrogate endpoints leading towards FDA approval for new drug applications.

There are many drugs in development that could benefit from the “hard evidence” that quantitative measurements can provide. For instance, in Alzheimer’s disease, the hippocampus shrinks as the disease gets worse. In a drug trial, repeated measurements of the hippocampus would be able to tell if the drug is working or not.

Table 1 shows the numbers of ongoing drug trials found by browsing by Disease Heading at the web site, http://clinicaltrials.gov. Figure 3 shows the relative proportions of the number of trials for each disorder. These numbers are out of 5954 active clinical trials (or 16986 that were no longer recruiting patients). Half of the active trials were sponsored by the NIH itself with the rest from Universities/Organizations (31%), Industry (17%) and other Federal agencies (3%).

Figure 3 – Relative number of disorders in ongoing clinical trials from the data in Table 1

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