A Massachusetts father whose 12-year-old son is going through cancer treatment is calling out a rapidly expanding kind of online wager: people betting on clinical trial results and whether new medicines will receive federal approval.
What's happening?
According to NPR, Joshua Pederson, a humanities professor at Boston University, was disturbed to discover that Kalshi and Polymarket offer bets tied to trial outcomes and drug approvals as his son participates in a clinical trial for an experimental cancer therapy.
Pederson says the human stakes are being overlooked.
"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," he told NPR.
Pederson added that when a study fails, the impact is more than financial: "People are going to suffer, people are going to die, people are going to have one fewer clinical option available to them."
For its part, Kalshi told NPR these markets may offer signals about which treatments look most likely to succeed, potentially helping investors and researchers assess promising medicines.
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"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 spokesperson Jack Such. Such also suggested that prediction markets can offer "valuable information to researchers" that he said the stock market can't.
The argument has not persuaded everyone in the medical field.
"Prediction markets can be valuable in some settings because they aggregate information, but clinical trials are fundamentally different," Nicholas Zaorsky, a radiation oncology professor at the Mayo Clinic in Florida, told NPR.
Why does it matter?
Critics say prediction market sites could impact the integrity of clinical trials if people involved in a trial try to influence outcomes to gain a financial advantage.
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David Tsai, who directs trials at a biotech company in the San Francisco Bay Area, warned that someone working with an infusion-based drug "could obviously adjust the infusion rate" or make other changes that might affect both patient safety and the trial data.
"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," Tsai told NPR.
The controversy also underscores broader concerns about the rapid growth of what many view as online gambling.
Even when companies frame prediction markets as information tools or entertainment, their expansion can raise alarms about predatory design, aggressive advertising, and financial risk. In this case, it also raises ethical questions about whether betting should be tied to sensitive matters.
What's being done?
Kalshi says it has protections in place, including employment checks and surveillance systems designed to spot suspicious activity. It also says its markets center on late-stage clinical trials whose participants have already been chosen and bans betting on trials in which all participants are minors, according to NPR.
Still, pushback is beginning to build among researchers.
Tsai created a petition seeking a ban on betting tied to drug trials. As of August 11, it has over 600 signatures.
And while prediction markets have helped put a stop to insider trading elsewhere, as NPR noted, for Pederson, treating life-and-death matters this way shouldn't be on the table.
"It's a dark idea," he told NPR. "It's quite ghastly."
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