Drug research is the topic tackled in this week’s Futures story. Written by Steve Zisson, Treatment naive takes an unusual approach to clinical trials. Steve, who has spent a lot of his time writing about clinical research, kindly took some time out to explain what inspired him to write the piece. Warning, the below contains spoilers, so read the story first!

Writing Treatment naive

This short story evolved from my experiences reporting on how to make the clinical-research process more efficient from my time as a writer and eventually editorial director of Boston-based clinical trials publisher CenterWatch, and then as president of medical education publisher, Carlat Publishing.

Clinical research is challenging and one of the intractable problems is finding enough patients for clinical trials. Indeed, an entire industry has sprung up to help pharmaceutical companies improve patient recruitment for clinical trials. It is a very competitive business.

So, as a speculative fiction writer, I foresaw a day when researchers would run out of volunteer patients needed to test drug candidates in clinical trials. So how would desperate researchers go about finding a new population of volunteers?

Time travel might help, I thought, particularly to periods in history before there were many, or any, medications. But as a science-fiction writer and reader, I had a problem because I’m not an especially big fan of time-travel stories and, in fact, have assiduously avoided writing any time-travel yarns. In this case, I got over my reluctance in order to peer into the future of clinical research.