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Comment by Aissen | Hacker News Reader

FYI, the drug being tested was for Parkinson's disease (nytimes doesn't say that but lemonde does): http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2016/01/15/essai-thera...

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Side question: is it normal in French to stylize the title as "lemonde"?

It would be strange in English, to my eyes, to refer to a newspaper whose name was "The World" as theworld.

French here: no, it is not common.

It is sometimes referred as "lemonde.fr", but the space is never omitted if we are not citing the web domain (with its TLD).

Seems weird to do a Phase I trial in healthy volunteers for a monoclonal antibody targeted to Parkinson's.

This is the whole point of a Phase 1 trial.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phases_of_clinical_research#Ph...

You don't test Phase 1 anticancer drugs in healthy volunteers. So likewise monoclonal antibodies for Parkinson's should probably be first tested in the affected population.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3678815/

Only when they're known to be toxic, drugs which are considered otherwise benign (or at least not excessively toxic) which include some newer cancer drugs are tested in healthy volunteers.

Perhaps they do - if all Phase 1 is done on healthy human guinea pigs. Better question is why do we allow otherwise healthy people to be guinea pigs?

Because we need to know about drug side effects, and it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, to parse out those effects in people who are already very sick. Additionally, those side effects are likely far less dangerous in an otherwise healthy individual.

> You don't test Phase 1 anticancer drugs in healthy volunteers.

[citation needed]

Phase I is for safety. And it's hard to separate the effects of the drug from other health effects if the patients aren't healthy to begin with.

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