Social Media as Research Tool

With overregulation of the clinical research arena, the whole area is ripe for disruption, especially for research performed on rare disorders. Today, it appears that a new mode of assessing efficacy of novel therapies using social media might just be the perfect disruptor:

The new study, published online in the journal Nature Biotechnology, represents an early example of how social networking could play a role in clinical trials, an area of medical science with strict procedures that many would consider especially difficult to apply in the online world.

"The approach has tremendous potential,'' said Lee Hartwell, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist now at Arizona State University, and formerly president of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Standard clinical trials play a central role in the research enterprise of both of those institutions.

Dr. Hartwell, who wasn't involved in the study, said social-network trials aren't likely to replace conventional randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled trials, the gold-standard for generating medical evidence. But such trials have become so complicated and time-consuming that new models are needed, he said.

It's about to be a whole new world...

-Wes

Reference:
Wicks P, Vaughan TE, Massagli MP, Heywood J.
Accelerated clinical discovery using self-reported patient data collected online and a patient-matching algorithm Nature Biotechnology 24 April 2011 | doi:10.1038/nbt.1837