Why are healthy volunteers important?

Click on this video to hear why healthy volunteers are important in clinical trials.

Healthy volunteers have always played an important role in research. Reasons healthy volunteers are important to research include:

• Provide a comparison for those with illness or disease. This can be to:
  • Compare a group of healthy people to a group of people with a disease or illness
  • Compare someone healthy directly to someone with an illness who has similar characteristics (sex, age, family relationship, etc.)
• Determine normal results (for example, when testing a new blood test).
• Learn why some people get a disease and other people do not.
• Help researchers understand why some medicines work well for some people but do not work well for others.
• Help people in the future.