Evolve or die: the urgent need to streamline RCTs by Sir Rory Collins, FRS, FMedSci.
There is an urgent need to develop comprehensive guidelines based on the scientific principles underlying randomized, controlled trials that focus on those aspects that really matter for both generating reliable findings and ensuring patient safety, and that take advantage of technological advances to increase the scope of randomized evidence. Such guidelines would be relevant not only for the various phases of clinical development that lead to regulatory approval of new interventions (with reduction of wasteful practices allowing more new treatments to become available) but also for non-commercial randomized trials of existing treatments (making more such trials affordable leading to better patient care and improved public health).
Sir Rory Edwards Collins FMedSci FRS is a British physician who is Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at the Clinical Trial Service Unit within the University of Oxford, the head of the Nuffield Department of Population Health and a Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford.
