|
A Canadian doctor told attendees at a major health care conference that a recent study concluded that drug companies can save money by outsourcing clinical trials to countries like India and China instead of in the United States and Europe, according to a recent Reuters article.
Dr. Salim Yusuf of McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, who led a research team that experimented on 15,000 heart-attack patients in India and China, found that the use of an inexpensive blood-thinning drug called rivaparin can save lives in poor countries without having to resort to expensive treatments or brand name drugs, according to the report.
"Who says you can't do good studies in less-developed countries?" Yusuf said at a news conference during a meeting of the American Heart Association.
Most drug trials are conducted in Western countries, where a well-established system exists for experimenting on patients, the wire service pointed out.
However, Dr Raymond Gibbons of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, who organized the medical conference, reportedly told reporters that it has become much more difficult to conduct the trials in the United States since they are typically expensive and researchers complain that patients are not always cooperative.
Yusuf said his study could not have been done in a richer country, where more paperwork and management of patients is required in clinical trials, according to Reuters. His team also had the luxury of treating patients in the hospital, where they could be watched, for seven days straight. |
