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In silico clinical trials


An in silico clinical trial is an individualised computer simulation used in the development or regulatory evaluation of a medicinal product, device, or intervention. While completely simulated clinical trials are not feasible with current technology and understanding of biology, its development would be expected to have major benefits over current in vivo clinical trials, and research on it is being pursued.

The term in silico indicates any use of computers in clinical trials, even if limited to management of clinical information in a database.

The traditional model for the development of medical treatments and devices begins with pre-clinical development. In laboratories, test-tube and other in vitro experiments establish the plausibility for the efficacy of the treatment. Then in vivo animal models, with different species, provide guidance on the efficacy and safety of the product for humans. With success in both in vitro and in vivo studies, scientist can propose that clinical trials test whether the product be made available for humans. Clinical trials are often divided into four phases. Phase 3 involves testing a large number of people. When a medication fails at this stage, the financial losses can be catastrophic.

Predicting low-frequency side effects has been difficult, because such side effects need not become apparent until the treatment is adopted by many patients. The appearance of severe side-effects in phase three often causes development to stop, for ethical and economic reasons. Also, in recent years many candidate drugs failed in phase 3 trials because of lack of efficacy rather than for safety reasons. One reason for failure is that traditional trials aim to establish efficacy and safety for most subjects, rather than for individual subjects, and so efficacy is determined by a statistic of central tendency for the trial. Traditional trials do not adapt the treatment to the covariates of subjects:


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