Considering a Clinical Trial for Lung Cancer Treatment? What You Should Know
Considering a Clinical Trial for Lung Cancer Treatment? What You Should Know from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
Dr. Tejas Patil explains why lung cancer patients should consider participating in clinical trials and the role trials play in treatment choices for lung cancer.
Dr. Tejas Patil is an academic thoracic oncologist at the University of Colorado Cancer Center focused on targeted therapies and novel biomarkers in lung cancer. Learn more about Dr. Patil, here.
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Transcript:
Dr. Patil:
In general, I would highly recommend patients consider clinical trials. I think there’s a couple of things to point out. It’s very important to remember that clinical trials are evaluating novel therapies as compared to current standard best practice. So, placebos are rarely used in cancer research unless there’s no known effective therapy. It’s important to remember, it’s not ethical to have someone take placebo if there’s known treatment that work, so when a patient enrolls in a clinical trial, sometimes they don’t know which treatment they’re getting, but at least they will know that whatever treatment they’re getting is the best current standard of care.
I want to also point out that clinical trials really answer, in my mind, two important questions. The first question is, is the new treatment safe? And does the new treatment work better than current standard of care? These are really important questions for advancing the field, especially in cancer research. Clinical trials are a small part of the research. I mean, when a drug that’s getting introduced into a clinical trial, it’s sometimes helpful to think about all the investment that has gone in before them. The drug has to be discovered, created.
It has to be purified, tested in animal studies, before it ever reaches human studies. And so, there’s only the most promising agents are actually ever introduced at clinical trials, and there’s a lot of data to show that the biggest barrier for completing clinical trials, and therefore understanding which treatments are effective, is really participant enrollment.
I think there was a recent study that showed that about, I think less than five percent of patients, less than 1 in 20, with cancer will ever take part in a clinical trial, Therefore, if a patient has that opportunity, I would strongly encourage them to consider it.
