Mexico is already the second country with the most clinical studies in Latam

2023-05-16 00:00:52

• Currently there are almost 5,000 protocols in Mexico to investigate more than 1,800 diseases.
• The scientific research phase is necessary and mandatory to obtain data on the efficacy and safety of a new drug, device or vaccine under development.
• The only country that performs more clinical studies than Mexico, within Latin America, is Brazil.

Clinical studies are a fundamental part of medicine. Before being able to use a drug or treatment, there is a previous work that lasts for years to verify its correct functioning. Sometimes medicines have even been detected that were created for one disease but in the end were useful for another.

The most studied diseases

Within the national level, there are currently more than 4,690 clinical studies for Mexico focused on investigating the effect of new therapies in 1,843 diseases. The main research focuses, in a proportion of almost 40% of the total by category, are in diseases of the immune system, followed by those of the respiratory tract.

But in the extensive list there are also hundreds of studies for other conditions, ranging from those that require highly specialized medicine to the search for new answers for patients with the main conditions that concern us in Mexico: heart disease, diabetes and cancer.

When consulting the database of clinical studies, in ClinicalTrials.gov, this data is also striking: there is slightly more participation by women than men, in a ratio of 96% vs. 92% of the studies. It should be remembered that women have been included in clinical research for less than 50 years.

For his part, Mexico ranks second in Latin America in the number of clinical studies, far behind Brazil. It has registered twice as many studies as our country, with 9,200 studies. Globally, we are quite far from the leader in this matter, which is the United States, with more than 160,000, followed by Europe as a whole and China.

What is a clinical study?

It consists of a scientific research project focused on obtaining data on the efficacy and safety of a drug, device or vaccine under development. Participation in a clinical project must be voluntary and with an informed decision about the potential risks and benefits. There are rules and processes that protect the integrity and rights of the participants.

There are various stages: from preclinical, with tissues or cell models, to clinical, from Phase 1 to 4, which already include the participation of people with some disease or healthy, depending on the objective of the study. In Mexico there is a minimal part of preclinical research reported in ClinicalTrials.gov with only 17 studies.

While in phases 1 and 2 there are just over a thousand and in the most advanced, 3 and 4, there are almost 2,500. But there are also other scientific studies outside of this classification, totaling 637, and they analyze cases such as the effects of drinking hibiscus water or coffee on obese or overweight people. All this translates into hundreds of jobs for people dedicated to science in Mexico.

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