Clearly inferior treatments are unethical. 

Donald Berry at MD Anderson in Houston TX  and Jay Kadane at Carnegie 
Mellon have been working on more ethical designs within the Bayesian 
framework.  In particular, response adaptive designs reduce the assignment 
to and continuation of patients on inferior treatments.






Bert Gunter <gunter.berton@gene.com> 
Sent by: r-help-bounces@r-project.org
09/20/2010 01:31 PM

To
r-help@r-project.org
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Subject
[R] OT: Is randomization for targeted cancer therapies ethical?






Hi Folks:

**Off Topic**

Those interested in clinical trials may find the following of interest:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/health/research/19trial.html

It concerns the ethicality of randomizing those with life-threatening
disease to relatively ineffective SOC when new "biologically targeted"
therapies "appear" to be more effective. While the context may be new,
the debate, itself, is not: Tukey wrote (or maybe it was talked -- I
can't remember for sure) about this about 30 years ago. I'm sure many
other also have done so.

Cheers,

Bert
-- 
Bert Gunter
Genentech Nonclinical Biostatistics

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