Then you do Phase I, or ‘first in man’, studies on a small number of brave, healthy young men who need money, firstly to see if it kills them, and also to measure basic things like how fast the drug is excreted from the body (this is the phase that went horribly wrong in the TGN1412 tests in 2006, where several young men were seriously injured). If this works, you move to a Phase II trial, in a couple of hundred people with the relevant illness, as a ‘proof of concept’, to work out the dose, and to get an idea if it is effective or not. A lot of drugs fail at this point, which is a shame,
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