I was in Brussels recently, where I visited the European Parliament, which got me thinking about the impact on clinical research that comes about as a result of government organizations around the world setting the regulations for how trials should be run.

It can often seem as though those regulations are designed to ensure a potential treatment fails the trial. And in some ways that makes perfect sense.

What we’re doing when studying the efficacy of potential new treatments, is essentially getting volunteers to expose themselves to something that could be harmful to them.

So, yes, it makes sense to try and ensure from a regulatory perspective that most potential treatments fail at the trial stage. Not because we want to restrict the development of new treatments, but because we want to ensure the only treatments released to the public are the ones that will do the least harm.