This is how it already works - this is what a clinical trial is. If you want to include the data point of a medicine working well as admissible, then you better have more than one patient try it at a time. Unless of course your drug is so good at curing patients who are absolutely terminal (like ibrutinib was). But most meds are not that much of a blockbuster. Thus you don’t know if a single patient survived if it’s because this medicine was very effective or if it was just as good as any other available treatment regimen.
>This is how it already works - this is what a clinical trial is.
That's not at all how clinical trials work. If and when someone decides to advance a drug to the next stage of development, it's done because they think there's a sufficiently profitable market at the end of the road. So lots of extremely promising drugs stall out if the numbers don't make sense. Furthermore, the trial enrollment process itself is cumbersome and often your only entrypoint is email "[email protected]" and hope you can a response and can navigate their arbitrary screening process. Speaking of screening: trials are full of exclusion criteria. They can get copy-pasted between trial protocols and often have no real reason excluding you. What's the washout period for your last line of chemo? Ever had any kind of immunotherapy? &c &c From the point of view of whoever is trying to get a drug approved it's better to be safe than sorry wrt any kind of uncertainty in a patient's medical status or treatment history. But that means that there might be a drug that looks extremely promising from previous trials but the only current trial excludes you for a small reason.
The problem with clinical trials is that they are looking for specific patients, though. And they will exclude patients that introduce confounding variables. Some studies exclude patients that are closest to death because they will interfere with the trial as well.
