ICC Trials: New Option on Laboratory Tests


On April 7 AIDS TREATMENT NEWS reported that some volunteers
had had trouble enrolling in ICC 001, the first trial by the
Inter-Company Collaboration for AIDS Drug Development, a
consortium of 15 major pharmaceutical companies. At some
sites, the volunteers may have had to pay for pre-screening
blood tests, which required the blood to have been drawn
within the last 30 days.

ICC has recently written to the investigators at all of its
sites, explaining that it was never the intention to make
volunteers pay for blood tests, and providing an additional
option for financing these tests. In this new procedure,
laboratory specimens are submitted to Roche Biomedical
Laboratory (RBL), using requisition forms provided by RBL, and
the cost will be billed to the ICC.

There are also funds available to assist in enrolling women,
minorities, and indigent patients in these trials, and this
money can sometimes be used as an additional option for
financing the pre-screening blood tests.