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Essay On Cancer Drugs

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To approve a candidate cancer drug into clinical use, clinical trials upon human bodies would be performed after preclinical tests which have already shown potential of compounds through in vivo and in vitro tests. Usually, the clinical tests can be classified into three main phases of phase I, phase II, and phase III. Phase 0 and phase IV are also sometimes included.
Phase 0 studies often use only a few small doses of a new drug in a few patients to generally learn whether and how a new drug may work. Because drug doses are very low, there are almost no benefits and less risk to the patients compared to phase I studies. Phase 0 studies are not a required part of testing a new drug and are not very commonly used. [1]
The phase I clinical …show more content…

Usually, larger amounts of patients up to 200 patients with the same type of cancer are treated with the dose and method found to be the safest in phase I studies. Some phase II studies may also randomly assign participants to different treatment groups, which are much like phase III trials. Sometimes, patients in this phase may get different doses or get the treatment in different ways to see which provides the best balance of safety and effectiveness. If enough patients benefit from the phase II clinical trial and the side effects are acceptable, the treatment is allowed to go on to a phase III clinical trial. [1][2]
In phase III clinical trials, the new treatment will be compared with current standard treatment to see whether it is better with more effectiveness and less side effects. Phase III clinical trials are expensive and tend to take much longer up to many years, and they also have a larger amount of patients from at least several hundred up to several thousand. Moreover, the designs of phase III clinical trials are more complex. It is better to include men, women, and people of all ages and racial in patients groups, then randomly assigned the patients into different treatments groups to get either the standard treatment or the new treatment usually by using computer program. Ideally, a double-blind study in which neither the doctor nor the patient knows which of the treatments the patient is getting is also used in this

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