Question: do you need volunteers for stem cell research?

James Chan answered on 25 Mar 2011:

Hi James, haha, we’ll let you know when we do! At the moment, we’re still working on animals but hope to try it on humans soon. But then we’ll need an injury before we can test whether our drug can make a difference! There are strict laws about what we can or can’t do to humans, including experimenting on them. We need to demonstrate that what we’re doing is safe for humans and the volunteers will need to be monitored very closely to make sure nothing untoward happens to them. These studies take a long time to plan and carry out, and you are right, recruiting the right kind of patients is very difficult – because everybody’s so different, you’d probably need hundreds or thousands of patients to make sure the effect you are testing for e.g. speed to heal a broken bone, is real and not just because one person is younger than the other, and so on…