Hospices Are a Growing Venue for Drug Trials

September 28, 2007

Hospices are emerging as a new setting for drug trials as demand rises for medicines to address the needs of dying patients. Progenics Pharmaceuticals Inc., the small Tarrytown, N.Y. company seeking approval of methylnaltrexone, recently tested it among 287 patients, most of them in the final months of their lives and under the care of hospices. The constipation it aims to treat is often an agonizing side effect of opioid drugs such as morphine, commonly used to control pain in the terminally ill. (Wall Street Journal)