Drug Development and Challenges for Neuromuscular Clinical Trials

Drug development process faces many challenges, including those encountered in clinical trials for neuromuscular diseases. Drug development is a lengthy and highly costly process. Out of 10 compounds entering first study in man (phase 1), only one compound reaches the market after an average of 14 years with a cost of $2.7 billion. Nevertheless, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services, prescription drugs constituted only 9 % of each health care dollar spent in USA in 2013. Examples of challenges encountered in neuromuscular clinical trials include lack of validated patient-reported outcome tools, blinding issues, and the use of placebo in addition to lack of health authority guidance for orphan diseases. Patient enrollment challenge is the leading cause of missed clinical trial deadlines observed in about 80 % of clinical trials, resulting in delayed availability of potentially life-saving therapies. Another specific challenge introduced by recent technology is the use of social media and risk of bias. Sharing personal experiences while in the study could easily introduce bias among patients that would interfere with accurate interpretation of collected data. To minimize this risk, recent neuromuscular studies incorporate as an inclusion criterion the patient’s agreement not to share any of study experiences through social media with other patients during the study conduct. Consideration of these challenges will allow timely response to the high unmet medical needs for many neuromuscular diseases.