Clinical trial software

A recent review in the Journal of the American Medical Association of Pharsight Corp.'s Pharsight Trial Designer CD-ROM provided an evaluation of the bioinformatics software. Trial Designer allows companies to simulate the outcome of a given (input) clinical trial with a particular compound with known metabolic characteristics.

However, the program is most useful in simulating trial outcome rather than directly providing advice on what sort of trial should be run for particular drug development goals. "It does not replace the need for a statistician to help decide which design is appropriate," wrote Harold Lehmann, director of medical informatics education at Johns Hopkins University's School of Medicine and author of the JAMA review. "There is no intelligent help to aid you in deciding which design is needed for which phase of the research program."...