| ▲ | vasco 10 hours ago |
| Since these are cancer trials I'm assuming no test subjects get paid, and university PhDs research for free, like in every other field, so what necessarily has to be expensive about it? If you have to pay 200 homeless to take your 0.0001% better than placebo antidepressants in the context of a huge corporation, and maybe redo the trial a few times, I can see how that gets expensive, but I don't see why it's a de facto rule. But even the big trials it's weird how expensive people say they are. Most other products require a lot of high paid labor to produce, think of a video game studio for example, also without any guarantee it won't flop, and it certainly takes longer to develop than to do a clinical trial. |
|
| ▲ | robertlagrant 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > Most other products require a lot of high paid labor to produce, think of a video game studio for example, also without any guarantee it won't flop, and it certainly takes longer to develop than to do a clinical trial. You have to try really hard to make a video game no-one wants[0]. You might not recoup all your investment, but you won't sell zero copies. A drug can have all that money poured in, and nothing come of it. [0] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/09/two-weeks-after-launc... |
| |
|
| ▲ | rahkiin 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| PhD candidates are paid salary in the Netherlands. Less of course than the senior trial researchers at pharma. I also would not assume there is no compensation for subjects as thats part of the medical-ethical process and not just ‘it helps the subject so no money’. |
| |
| ▲ | vasco 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | The €30k to €35k per year they make in this context approximates to free. Any normal company has to pay much more than that for less. A non-phd software engineer will get paid much more to change button colors for example. So that can't be the reason they are expensive and a PhD candidate is doing many other things than just helping to run trials. | | |
| ▲ | JPLeRouzic 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Any normal company has to pay much more than that for less In most EU countries, the employee receives much less than what they cost the employer. In France, if an employee gets 30K euros, the employer has to provision ~45K Euros. | | |
| ▲ | vasco 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | What's your point? I've lived in 3 different european countries, I'm familiar with fully loaded costs, I don't see how social security changes anything. By paying more for less I mean PhDs candidates are very cheap labor for what they bring to the table. |
| |
| ▲ | StefanBatory an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Also as much as it pains to say, 30-35k Euro is high salary there. :( |
|
|
|
| ▲ | monero-xmr 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| This is the most misinformed unknowing take in all of the comments. You can’t just recruit “200 homeless” and have it pass research standards. The homeless population is the most difficult of all to track, maintain accurate records, and even recruit for that matter. You think the homeless just line up for novel drug trials and report back for updates on a strict schedule? You need good candidates for the trial. You need them to follow up. You need admins to properly track them and ensure it’s at least mostly accurate. Even the best trial candidates won’t follow the protocol correctly. |
| |
| ▲ | vasco 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I invite you to read https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Carl-Elliott/publicatio... If you genuinely think the medical and pharma industry don't exploit homeless and other marginalized populations out the wazoo as lab rats. They also only stopped doing it to prisioners when it was made illegal, because that's what they did before. Of course using them has a lot of practical problems, as you outline, other than the much bigger ethical issue. You managed to miss the whole point of the comment though. Which is, how is it possible that a multibillion dollar industry, exploiting both the test subjects AS WELL as the researchers in the form of practically free PhD candidates can still claim it's one of the most dificult / expensive endeavours? Where does the money go? When you look, it goes to the bureocrats and to the "bio-investors". | |
| ▲ | 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | pfdietz 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I (not homeless!) was recently in a vaccine trial (Moderna's mRNA vaccine for RSV). The trial paid me $100 per office visit, just to show up. There were periodic phone checkups ($50) and a weekly status check through an app ($10). I did follow the protocol pretty damn well. There was an incentive to come in and get checked when symptoms occurred, including when I came down with COVID at one point after a trip to Europe. |
|
