Both patient participation in clinical trials and compassionate use of experimental treatments are fairly common for cancer patients, with various accessibility barriers. (One issue with the latter, for example, is that the incentives aren't lined up for companies to provide unapproved drugs to dying patients, you're way more likely to get a horrible complication that leads to bad press than a miraculous recovery).

Here's an insightful blog series about Jake Seliger's experience participating in clinical trials. He was a regular HackerNews user who passed away in 2024: https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/please-be-dying-but-not-...

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amelius 3 hours ago | parent [-]

What is the success rate of a clinical trial? Just to see things in perspective.

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throwup238 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It's around 10-15% for the whole drug I-III flow (13.8% according to [1]), but that varies dramatically based on therapeutic area. On the order of a third of infectious disease vaccines might be approved but only maybe 5% of oncology therapies because the latter often have a different standard for approval so it's cheaper to run trials.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6409418/

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amelius 2 hours ago | parent [-]

That's interesting, but I was talking about the success rate of someone with a terminal illness going the clinical trial route. Sorry, I now see that my question was not so precise.

	▲	throwup238 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		For cancer, it doesn't seem to impact survival odds at all [1]. In other fields it may improve metrics a small bit but that's largely because in clinical trial patient selection, they're very careful to exclude anyone with an even remotely confounding factor (like weight/BMI). [1] https://www.science.org/content/article/joining-cancer-trial...