Article Text
Abstract
Many potential therapeutic agents are discarded before they are tested in humans. These are not quack medications. They are drugs and other interventions that have been developed by responsible scientists in respectable companies or universities and are often backed up by publications in peer-reviewed journals. These possible treatments might ease suffering and prolong the lives of innumerable patients, yet they have been put aside. In this paper, we outline a novel mechanism—the Plutocratic Proposal—to revive such neglected research and fund early phase clinical trials. The central idea of the Proposal is that any patient who rescues a potential therapeutic agent from neglect by funding early phase clinical trials (either entirely or in large part) should be offered a place on the trial.
- Clinical Ethics
- Clinical trials
- Ethics
- Ethics Committees/Consultation
- Research Ethics
This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
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Footnotes
Twitter Follow Dominic Nutt @DominicNutt
Funding VictoryNET.
Competing interests This paper was conceived and proposed by AM and DN who obtained a grant from VictoryNET, a trust set up by Vince Hamilton to fund research into and promote understanding of neuroendocrine cancer. The grant covered the costs (travel, research, time) while the authors worked on the paper. VictoryNET is not responsible for the content of the paper and has not sought to influence it.
Patient consent Obtained.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
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