In this country, trials and studies are overseen by the government, under the auspices of the Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, Food and Drug Administration, and others. When a person participates in a clinical trial, he or she may benefit from a new drug, procedure, or symptom-control method, while helping researchers evaluate its effectiveness. Many of today's most effective interventions are the direct result of knowledge gained through clinical trials.
Most clinical research progresses in an orderly series of steps.
This allows researchers to ask and answer questions in a way that expands our information about the drug and its effects on people. Based on what has been learned in laboratory experiments or previous trials, researchers formulate hypotheses or questions that need to be answered. Then they carefully design a clinical trial to test the hypothesis and answer the research question. It is customary to separate different kinds of trials into phases that follow one another in an orderly sequence. I trial usually enrolls only a small number of patients.