Doing clinical research for the first time - advice please!

[DrCheerful]

I'm going to be doing clinical research for the first time. What should I expect? Do you all have any tips on how to really make this a great experience and to make my PI happy?

---

Members don't see this ad.

 

[ialwayslose]

be familiar with pubmed and journals, as well as how to read them.

read the relevant literature prior to beginning your lab work, so you 1) know whats going on, 2) can potentially impress with a small gem of knowledge.

you'll probably be doing busy-work at first, if this is your first first lab experience, but get through that, and hopefully show that you are ready for more advanced work.

also

sincerely hope that you have a good PI, who loves what they do and actually wants to teach a young student. how you perceive your research experience is largely dependent on the PI imo.

 

[DrCheerful]

How is clinical research different in what I will be doing compared to basic science research?

 

[kami333]

How is clinical research different in what I will be doing compared to basic science research?

That's a very broad question, it depends on what kind of basic science research you did and what sort of clinical research you are going to do.

In general, clinical research is harder since you usually get one shot to get it right, you don't get mulligans.

For example, if you are working with mice tissue samples and screw them up somehow (mix them up, perform wrong extraction, improper storage, etc), it can be a big problem but you can always redo the experiment so it isn't necessarily a show stopper. But it's pretty much impossible to ask a patient to undergo another biopsy. Or when you are doing a retrospective study there's really no way to reconfirm an observation other than what was written down.

The other issue is the paperwork; you have to keep track of consents, deal with issues of confidentiality/deidentification, IRB audits and reports (there are a lot of things like deviations and adverse events that have to be reported within a specific timeframe).

It just depends on what sort of clinical research you are doing (ie retrospective, observational, clinical trials, etc) and your exact role.

I can tell you the my biggest pet peeve is people being sloppy. I'm not saying it's intentional or even laziness (I don't go to the clinics often but I know enough to know that it can get very hectic at times), but things like mishandling samples by not storing them properly (freeze/thaw artifacts evident in tissue samples) or entering physiologically improbable numbers just annoy me. I think at least part of it has to do with the nature of clinical research, there's just so many people involved and most of them are so far removed for the experimental design and analysis that they don't feel ownership over the project, but that's a different discussion.

 

[gmcguitar4]

Are you going to be an assistant to a research coordinator? If so, it is probably not lab research. Expect a ton of paperwork and sorting through patient records. You have to screen patients, follow-up with them, and stay on top of all paperwork involved. If the hospital is big you are working at will probably have a ton of research trials that haven't started yet either. You will have to help get that paperwork ready for the IRB. It is pretty cool experience overall because you experience a whole other part of medicine.