Sometimes you read a media report about study results, and all you can do is think, “Wow, that sounds so cool!”
Unless, of course, you work at an IRB. Then you also can’t help but think about the risks and benefits, and how a study like this would be handled at your institution. How do you think our IRB would have reviewed a study studying the safety drilling a hole into the participants’ skulls and injecting bone-marrow-derived stem cells into parts of the brain previously damaged by stroke? The study wasn’t intended to look at efficacy, only safety, but now the lead author says his team as been “stunned” by the results of this study involving 18 patients.