This week lecture on clinical trial protocol, specifically the planning stage, reminds of the experiments I had to conduct for my sociology class. My professor had gotten IRB approval for the entire class to conduct field research. We were told to come up with a sociological question and conducts interviews on campus and record our findings. The sociological question I investigated was if it was really “Okay” to cheat and does cheating help build a social network among peers. I had to first plan the specific questions I wanted to ask my interviewers, so I can get specific answers and then find people to interview. Once the interviews were completed, I had to write a report up with my analysis and data I collected. Only different from what I did and the clinical trial protocol was that I did not have a budget or my experiment did not go through monitoring and controlling, such as my results were not validated by other peers for accuracy.

I feel like we have been conducting experiment not necessarily clinical trials in school. Share a time whether in school or in industry when you implemented the clinical trial protocol we learned in this week’s lecture. How was it different from the clinical trial protocol?

Moreover, has anyone worked with clinical trials in the industry? How is the clinical trial protocol in the company you work for similar to what we learned in class? How are they different?