Betting on Clinical Trial Outcomes Called 'Ghastly' as Petition Seeks Ban

Billions of dollars change hands every week on lightly regulated prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket, where users wager on everything from election results and movie reviews to Middle East conflicts. Now these platforms have started accepting bets on whether regulators will approve new drugs and whether clinical trials will yield promising results.

Kalshi argues that such wagers provide investors with fresh insight into promising treatments, helping them decide which drug candidates deserve funding. Spokesman Jack Such pointed out that those looking to profit from failed trials can already do so on the stock market, where the financial incentives are orders of magnitude larger. Unlike the stock exchange, he added, prediction markets at least offer researchers no useful information.

Trial organizers strongly disagree. David Tsai, who runs clinical trials at a Bay Area biotech company, has launched an online petition calling for a ban on such betting, arguing it threatens the very foundation of trust and integrity in biotechnology. His main concern is that a bet placed by someone involved in a trial creates a motive to tamper with results for a payout.

Tsai offered a concrete example: a pharmacist who wagered on the success or failure of an oncology drug delivered via infusion could theoretically adjust the drip rate or the drug's storage temperature. Any such manipulation could directly skew trial outcomes, compromise data integrity, and endanger patient safety.

Nicholas Zaorsky, a radiation oncology professor at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, who has helped run clinical trials, shares the skepticism. He acknowledges that prediction markets can be valuable for aggregating information in some settings, but stresses that clinical trials are fundamentally different: investigators, coordinators, and sometimes even participants can directly influence the outcomes being wagered on.