"Sakura, you said you participated in a clinical trial when you were in high school, but how do you think you would feel if you found out that the drug you were taking in the clinical trial was a placebo?"
"That wouldn't be a very good feeling. In fact, I would feel sad if I found out that what I was taking was just a lump of sugar and not a drug."
"That's why, depending on the disease, a crossover method is used in which a placebo is administered for a certain period of time and then switched to administering an active drug, but you can't expect any therapeutic effect while taking the placebo, so the feeling of being uneasy remains the same."
Oh, that's the kind of curveball you've suddenly come up with today. But I know what our president is thinking.
"Especially in the case of patients with cancer or rare diseases, sometimes I wonder if administering a placebo is ethical."
"Yeah. That's why the idea of a synthetic arm came about."
So that's how it turned out.
"You need data on patients with cancer or rare diseases who have been given placebos in the past, right? But that kind of data doesn't just happen to be lying around, does it?"
"Exactly. You're on a roll today. It's not that there isn't any data like that, and it's been presented at academic conferences, but it's not like the data is in a place that's easy to use. That's the problem."
"That's why the next research topic is to combine the virtual twins technology that our company developed (see Episode 2) with real-world data and run a simulation to generate a perfect synthetic arm, in theory."
"You're on a roll today. I'll send you the drug information from Company A, so I'll ask you to set the virtual twins parameters and generate the synthetic arm."
"Understood."
I wondered what he was talking about at first, but that's what it came down to. Setting the criteria for virtual twins is a lot of work, but if there are about 100 cases, I think it could be calculated in about three hours.
And so, the night drew on as I sat facing the computer again today.