Dr Don Sin on Building Precision Medicine Into COPD Clinical Trial Design

Focusing therapeutic trials on 1 subtype of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) can help lead to smaller, targeted studies, which in can help advance precision medicine, said Don Sin, MD, FRCP, MPH, a professor of respiratory medicine at the University of British Columbia and head of the Centre of Heart Lung Innovation, St. Paul’s Hospital.

Transcript

How can clinical trials be structured differently, so that precision medicine COPD can advance?

So rather than taking COPD as one homogeneous disease, which it is not—COPD, you know, is basically an umbrella term for many different processes. So if therapeutic trials are focused on one subtype that is well characterized, then smaller studies can be performed and still get a significant result at the end of the day, and that would enhance administration and precision medicine. So for instance, if we knew a blood test that can segregate specific subtypes of COPD, and identify those individuals and give therapeutics that match that subtype, then, you know, we wouldn't need 1000s of patients, we may need hundreds, maybe even tens of patients to get a significant P value and demonstrate the efficacy of the therapeutic in question.