Prediction Markets Are Now Letting Users Bet on the Success of Life-Saving Medical Trials, and Doctors Warn It Could Invite a New Era of Sabotage
New low?
Prediction markets are now letting users bet on the success of life-saving medical trials, and doctors are sounding the alarm that this could open the door to sabotage. Platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have started offering wagers on whether experimental drugs will get approved by regulators or if clinical trials will succeed. The move has drawn sharp criticism from medical professionals, who warn that financial incentives could compromise the integrity of trials and even put patients at risk.
According to NPR, Joshua Pederson, a humanities professor at Boston University, knows firsthand how high the stakes are. His 12-year-old son, who loves drawing robots and scary art, was diagnosed with cancer two years ago. After months of chemotherapy and radiation, the cancer went into remission, only to return. Now, he is enrolled in a clinical trial for a new treatment. When Pederson heard about prediction markets letting people bet on trial outcomes, he was horrified.
“What seemed to be missed in the CEO statements was the fact that there were going to be patients on the other side of these bets,” Pederson said. He called the idea of profiting from trial failures “ghastly,” pointing out that a failed trial doesn’t just mean lost money but also patients lose access to potentially life-saving treatments.
Kalshi makes a case for new insight
Kalshi, one of the platforms offering these bets, argues that prediction markets can provide valuable insights into which drugs are likely to succeed. The company claims that allowing wagers on clinical trials will help investors decide where to put their money, potentially speeding up the development of new treatments.
“If you want to ban profiting from the failure of clinical trials, you would start with the stock market, where the financial incentive for this type of profit is orders of magnitude larger,” said Kalshi spokesman Jack Such. He also noted that while the stock market and prediction markets both allow betting on trial outcomes, prediction markets at least offer transparency that could benefit researchers.
But medical professionals aren’t buying it. David Tsai, who runs clinical trials at a biotech company in the San Francisco Bay Area, started an online petition calling for a ban on betting related to drug trials. He argues that the financial incentives could lead to tampering, with people involved in trials potentially manipulating results to cash in on their bets.
“If we were running a trial for an oncology drug that requires an infusion, a pharmacist who had placed a bet saying that it’s gonna work well, or doesn’t work well, could obviously adjust the infusion rate, could adjust the source temperature of the drug,” Tsai said. “They could change any number of variables that could obviously have a direct impact on how the trial and the data and the patient safety would come out.”
Prediction markets could jeopardize trust in the process
Nicholas Zaorsky, a professor of radiation oncology at the Mayo Clinic, echoed those concerns. He’s helped run clinical trials and believes prediction markets could undermine trust in the entire process.
“Prediction markets can be valuable in some settings because they aggregate information, but clinical trials are fundamentally different: investigators, coordinators, and sometimes even participants can directly influence aspects of the outcomes being wagered on,” Zaorsky said. “That creates financial incentives that risk undermining trial integrity.”
Kalshi has tried to address some of these concerns by bringing in experts like Anne Wojcicki, the founder of genetic testing company 23andMe, to vouch for the markets. A white paper sponsored by Kalshi argued that prediction markets could make clinical trials more accessible by providing transparent data about which treatments are most promising.
“Most patients don’t know about the choices available in clinical trials or which programs are most promising,” the paper stated. “The opportunity to have an open, transparent dataset about trial probabilities is extremely promising and empowering for people.” Right now, Kalshi users can bet on whether a weight-loss medication or a breast cancer treatment will get approved by regulators and on what date.
Polymarket is also taking wagers on cancer treatments and whether the U.S. will allow Chinese peptides to be sold domestically. Kalshi claims it has safeguards in place to prevent insider trading, including verifying employment and monitoring for unusual market activity. The company points to past cases where prediction markets helped uncover insider trading, like a former teleprompter operator for the President or a special forces soldier betting on military intelligence.
But these measures are not enough
From researchers to pharmacists to patients, clinical trials involve so many people that catching every potential bad actor might be impossible. Pederson worries that the gamified nature of prediction markets distances bettors from the real human cost. “One of the things that has struck me about these platforms is that they’re flashy and they’re gamified in such a way that you’re often kind of distanced from the real cost,” he said.
Kalshi says it’s only offering bets on late-stage clinical trials where participants have already been enrolled, and it won’t allow wagers on trials involving only minors. But Pederson fears that could change. If it does, he says the idea of researchers being motivated by prediction market profits will only add to the stress his son is already enduring. “The weight on him and what he’s being asked to do, and what he’s being asked to endure, is already so much,” Pederson said.
(Featured image: Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels)
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