Today’s post is the last of a three-part series on the Burt stem cell trials at Northwestern. This piece is focused on funding and the future of the trial, and also includes perspectives from patients.

You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here, which focused on issues related to potential encouragement of patient fundraising that unintentionally releases private information and on concerns over marketing of the ongoing trial as already known to be something like curative for MS. I’ve summarized my overall concerns in a flow chart below.

Trial funding

Should patients ever be required to scrape together one or two hundred thousand dollars to pay to get enrolled in any clinical trial? We have to keep in mind that in such trials patients have no guarantee of any benefits and could be harmed because the patients are research subjects. And what happens to the potentially large number of patients who cannot obtain that kind of money? They are excluded simply on that basis?

There may be certain instances where patients paying for a trial can be a responsible, positive thing. However, this is new territory overall for stem cell clinical research and there are sizable risks to this different kind of approach as compared to the past and to some other more traditional clinical experiments when sometimes patients were the ones receiving some kind of payment. As I discussed earlier in this series, extremely careful planning is needed to address bioethical and practical issues that may arise and anticipated risks to patients in such trials where patients have to contribute monetarily.

Some patients have said on the Internet that they are required to pay as much as $150,000 for participation in the Northwestern MS stem cell trial or in parallel off-study experimental administration of experimental stem cells.  If we estimate that about 100 patients have been required to pay (one way or another, such as themselves or via insurance or via online fundraising) on average $100,000 then that is in total $10 million for Northwestern University. Not a small sum, but clinical trials are expensive. If there have been 200 patients paying that much on average the total number could swell to $20 million. The big money involved here is just one more reason that NW and its IRB need to be extra careful in how it oversees this trial.

Do trial participants get any kind of discounted price on medical tests and procedures? Does the university cover all the research-specific (versus treatment) costs itself? How much does insurance pay for the average participant? How much does philanthropy by NW help the average patient? These same questions could be asked of any other trials that require patient payments as well, but there seems to be little if any information that I could find in the public domain on other stem cell IND-based trials that require large patient payments. Continue reading →