William Burke, M.D., Anna O. Stake Professor of Psychiatry and vice chairman for research in the department of psychiatry, is a clinical researcher.
Below he talks with UNMC Today about various aspects of doing clinical research.
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William Burke, M.D.
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What is the difference between a clinical and basic science researcher?
The most basic difference is that clinical researchers generally do research that directly involves patients rather than laboratory-based investigations.
What are some of the challenges you face as a clinical researcher?
Much of the work I do involves testing potential new treatments for diseases like Alzheimer’s disease (AD). There is a constant tension between the need to develop new treatments and the risks that are inherent in giving study drugs to patients, which often have not been used before. Another major challenge is that in the case of AD, for example, there are many more drugs awaiting testing than there are persons willing to participate in these needed studies. By one estimate there may be 140 potential study medications in the pipeline for AD needing to be tested while a much smaller number are in actual clinical trials.
How do you balance the clinical aspects with the actual research?
Tomorrow’s story — Building trust
Read UNMC Today on Friday to learn about a new partnership that will help build trust between the south Omaha community and UNMC in part to facilitate more effective clinical research.
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We try to be very clear that although the safety of the patients who participate in our studies is our number one concern, what we are doing is research, which means that we often know less about the likely outcomes. Most of our studies compare a group of patients taking a new study drug to a group taking a placebo. Neither the patient nor the investigator knows what group the patient is in and they usually don’t know until well after the study is completed. While this can be frustrating to some people, we have found that this type of careful study has been very valuable in making sure that new medications are truly useful and so we can assess and better understand the safety of the medications. We also are encouraged by evidence that suggests that patients who participate in research tend to do better than those that do not and we think some part of that is due to the careful observations these persons receive while they are participating in studies.