Faced with the prospect of death or debilitating disease, patients and their families may be willing to try almost any treatment. A number of systems exist to help prevent this understandable desperation from resulting in serious harm, including standards of medical professionalism, requirements for product approval by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and oversight of research by institutional review boards (IRBs). There are gaps in this safety net, however, that become particularly evident in the context of clinical trials that require patients to pay to participate. Although these trials may sometimes satisfy the standards of ethical research, the research oversight system in the United States is not sufficiently robust to ensure that this will always be the case.
Pay-to-Participate Trials
Clinical research is typically funded by governments, charitable foundations, and private companies. Built into this traditional funding system are review mechanisms intended to select for high-priority, high-quality studies. These mechanisms can often prevent the initiation of low-value studies, but they may also limit innovation by prioritizing incremental progress over bold ideas or deprioritizing research with little commercial promise. Inevitably, limited resources may force funders to forgo important studies.
One response is to seek out alternative funding sources, including study participants. Short of fraud protections, there is no legal prohibition against asking patients to pay to participate in research. The FDA explicitly permits charging for investigational products under certain circumstances, while regulations governing research consent simply call for disclosure of any “additional costs” that may result from participation.
