Clinical trials are often conducted at major hospitals and medical centers. As you can imagine, it can be expensive to use hospital resources and take a large amount of doctors’ and nurses’ time.
It can also be difficult to find people to participate in clinical trials. For those who do participate, it can be very time consuming. For example if a person does not live near the hospital where the trial is being conducted, the travel back and forth to doctor appointments alone can be a hardship.
We believe that people deserve better. When we started 23andMe, our dream was to change how we approach clinical trials. We want to make it less expensive, less time consuming and ultimately speed the pace of meaningful research and discoveries.
Today — we feel like things are starting to change. This week we announced that 23andMe and Genentech launched an online breast cancer study to learn more about how genes influence a person’s response to bevacizumab (also known as Avastin ®) in the treatment of metastatic breast cancer.
We are looking for 1,000 women with metastatic breast cancer who took bevacizumab in 2010 or 2011. Normally this kind of clinical trial would take years to do. We believe that by leveraging the web and modern technology we can do this study much faster, more effectively and for less money.
We salute Genentech for seizing the opportunity to rethink the approach to researching medicines with this first-of-its-kind clinical trial. Technology has improved our lives and will hopefully soon improve all our health care.
Bevacizumab is not approved by the FDA for the treatment of breast cancer. The InVite study is for research purposes only.
For more information on bevacizumab visit http://www.gene.com/
