Research: Introduction

"In God we trust, from others we require data."
W. EDWARDS DEMING, PHD, Noted management consultant

Clinical investigation and randomized clinical trials are the cornerstones of medical advances. Over the last 50 years, they have enabled us to gain control of a variety of infectious diseases, improve the outcomes for cardiovascular disease, organ and bone marrow transplantation, and help millions of people extend their active lifestyles.

And while it’s fair to say that the greatest progress in the 20th century was in the management of acute disease, now in the 21st we have the potential to influence the course of chronic diseases that as yet have remained untreatable. Instead of being forced to rely on stopgap measures that at best improve symptoms, we can for the first time look forward to developing disease-modifying therapies for neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s and ALS, psychiatric disturbances such as schizophrenia and depression, and cancer and rheumatoid arthritis.

Developing compounds for chronic disease is much more complicated than controlling acute disease, and requires input from experts in a variety of fields. CEPT’s expertise in drawing together interdisciplinary teams of investigators enables us to meet this challenge, speeding up our search for ways to evaluate new therapies more quickly and determine who will benefit, who is at risk for serious side effects, and what we can do to overcome those risks. In particular, the ability to develop and apply new measurement technologies will serve us well as we reach to extend the successes of modern biomedical science to even greater numbers of our population. It is our belief that improving the health of more and more individuals not only meets our humanitarian responsibilities, but will also have profound economic and social benefits.