A heart-drug trial that was "outsourced" to India and China -- an approach many industries are taking to save money -- demonstrates the potential for doing life-saving medical research on a budget, scientists said on Monday. The study shows that clinical trials, typically used to test the value of new drugs and treatments, do not have to be done in the United States and Europe, said Dr. Salim Yusuf of McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, who led the research. His team experimented on 15,000 heart-attack patients in India and China, and found that the use of an inexpensive blood-thinning drug called rivaparin can save lives in poor countries without having to resort to expensive treatments or brand name drugs. "Who says you can't do good studies in less-developed countries?" Yusuf said at a news conference during a meeting of the American Heart Association. Most drug trials are done in Western nations, where a well-established system exists for experimenting on patients. But Dr Raymond Gibbons of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, who organized the medical conference, said such trials have become increasingly difficult in the United States. The studies are typically expensive and researchers complain that patients are not always cooperative. --More 2359 Local Time 2059 GMT
