Research

Clinical trials currently recruiting - click here

Breakthroughs in health come about with collaboration and Dr Samuel works with several individuals and organisations within Australia and overseas. He is a senior lecturer in medicine at the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales.

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic condition of unknown cause.  Although there are many effective treatments for Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC), there remain many patients who do not respond to these treatments.  The development of better treatments with novel mechanisms of action requires clinical trials on human subjects.

You will find a list of clinical trials and projects with which his patients have an opportunity to be involved. Please contact him or the individual trial/project coordinator if you are interested in getting involved. All donations to his Crohn's and colitis research centre are tax deductible

Clinical trials currently recruiting

All  studies offered by Dr Samuel at the IBD research centre adhere to uniformly accepted ethical standards of human subject research, as established by the Declaration of Helsinki, the Belmont Report, and NHMRC National Statement on Research in Humans. They are governed by national ethics guidelines and codes of conduct established in the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research and the Australian Code for Responsible Conduct of Research.

These ethical principles are strictly enforced including beneficence - where subjects may access the study drug following study end and experimental findings are publicly disseminated; non-maleficence- where no studies have placebo-only arms and, patients that respond to a novel biologic study therapy are given ongoing access to these after the end of the study so that they do not risk loss of response due to immunogenicity;  respect for persons - where all subjects are  fully informed about medications with unknown expectations, and justice - where participants have clear, direct benefit, while protecting those with acute or refractory illness.

 

Randomised controlled trials: doctors use evidence when prescribing treatments...

"BEFORE the 20th century, the sick were wise to stay away from doctors. Medical treatments were often worthless and sometimes dangerous: “heroic measures” such as blood-letting and purging often killed. It was the discovery of micro-organisms, vaccines and antibiotics, that eventually equipped doctors with weapons that whacked diseases, not patients. But as many lives may have been saved by a more recent innovation, the randomised controlled trial (RCT). The idea is simple, yet brilliant. A new treatment is tested by giving it only to some randomly chosen patients, with the rest (the “controls”) receiving standard care. Before RCTs became common in the 1950s it was easy for a doctor to believe that patients who died did so despite his best efforts, while those who survived owed him their lives. He might harm patient after patient and never spot the pattern. Now almost all medicines are tested with RCTs before being widely prescribed."    The Economist Dec 12, 2015.