Clinical Trials for the Benefit of the Patient and the Economy

Abstract

The aim of the article is to investigate whether clinical trials contribute to the improvement of the health of patients and bring added value to the economy. An important task was also to demonstrate that without clinical trials there will be no development of medicine and thus no new effective therapies extending the life of patients and increasing the quality of this life. Achieving the assumed goal required an analysis of the literature and legal regulations regarding clinical trials in the context of the benefits that these trials can bring to the patient and the economy.

Clinical trials are an indispensable element in the process of developing new drugs. All new drugs must be tested in clinical trials for effectiveness and safety before they are administered to patients. Clinical trials are necessary for a drug manufacturer to be able to register a new drug and introduce it to the market, and so they constitute the foundation of modern medicine and are a condition for patients’ access to modern therapies and significantly contribute to expanding the professional knowledge of doctors. In recent years, the number of clinical trials conducted in Poland has increased significantly, but it is certainly not the peak of this market’s potential. The pharmaceutical sector is one of the fastest growing industries not only in Poland but also around the world. In Poland, the pharmaceutical industry accounts for 1% of the country’s GDP, which makes it the largest market in Central and Eastern Europe and the sixth largest in the European Union. The observed increase results mainly from the gradual lifting of barriers that had been inhibiting the development of the clinical trials market for many years. Unfortunately, there are still numerous legal and organizational limitations, which, if removed or changed, would allow the market to develop more dynamically. These limitations are present on both the domestic and the European Union markets. Therefore, Polish government administration bodies as well as European institutions make efforts to ensure that clinical trials become increasingly beneficial to both the patients and the economy of the countries in which they are conducted.