How do clinical trials work?

Did you know that it takes an average of 12 years for a prescription drug to make it from the beginning – an experiment in a laboratory – to its final destination, your pharmacy shelf? Before a new medicine, therapy, or method of preventing or diagnosing a disease can be approved for human use, it first must be tested by researchers for many years. The product is tested in a laboratory, and eventually makes its way to being tested in humans during clinical trials.