In 1997, Congress offered drug makers lucrative incentives to study their products in children. And in December, the Food and Drug Administration began requiring companies to test almost all new medicines on young people. The testing is necessary, experts say, because 80 percent of all the medicines children use have not been researched adequately in them. He bases chemotherapy doses on height and weight, but is cautious. Testing medicines is more complicated in children than in adults.
Children metabolize drugs differently than adults do.
So, when doctors at Children's Hospital of Los Angeles offered to enroll Brooke, then a sixth-grader, in a study of a new biotechnology drug, her family jumped at the chance. In December 1997, she took the last spot in a clinical trial. But there were risks and uncertainties. Brooke relapsed and eventually was put on the drug, which gained FDA approval for use in children in May 1999. In retrospect, Brooke is glad she participated.