Doing the right thing in clinical trials

A newspaper has launched a campaign in the UK to review the way that clinical trials are carried out in adolescents. It follows the death of a 17-year-old girl with Ewing’s sarcoma who was rejected for inclusion in a clinical trial of an experimental anticancer product on the grounds that she was too young: the inclusion criteria specified a minimum age of 18 years. The case has become something of a cause célèbre, as the girl was only weeks away from her 18th birthday.