Pandemic Highlights Urgency for New Methodologies for Evidence Generation

ABSTRACT

Randomized controlled trials, which many consider to be the gold standard of clinical research, were developed in the 1940s. [...]individual patients in the real world react often very differently to a specific drug than what has been predicted by the "mean" of a clinical trial. Many biopharmaceutical companies and AI startups are betting that with enough data, these methods will work so well that they will help to accelerate the discovery of new therapies for the novel corona virus, 2019-nCoV (see go.nature.com/3aLd0ll). * Causal AI methods might be uniquely positioned to discover underlying causes of disease and clinical response to treatment on an individual level, making personalized medicine real.