Terminal volunteers can save lives

At the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), a programme called Last Gift offers terminally ill patients the opportunity to help create more effective treatments.

- PETER SINGER BENJAMIN L SIEVERS

Their special circumstances transform the usual risk-benefit calculus of joining a clinical study of an untested drug. Researchers can ask them to consider consenting to being research participants in ways that they would not ask healthier people with long life expectancies, and terminally ill patients may choose to give that consent when others would be less likely to do so.

The leading United States research agencies, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, have recently issued strong statements about moving away from testing drugs on animals. The results from such tests, they now acknowledge, do not translate well into findings relevant to humans. Terminally ill patients can offer their own bodies to contribute to this growing effort to make drug testing more human-relevant, generating data on how people, rather than beagles or mice, respond to new treatments, while also reducing the suffering currently inflicted on laboratory animals.

Before launching Last Gift, researchers at UCSD surveyed nearly 500 people about end-of-life medical research. More than half said they would be willing to give up four weeks of their life to participate in research, even if they had only six months to live.