What Are the Benefits of Thyroid Cancer Clinical Trial Participation?
What Are the Benefits of Thyroid Cancer Clinical Trial Participation? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
What are the benefits of thyroid cancer clinical trial participation? Dr. Lori Wirth discusses how clinical trials provide access to promising new treatments, offering patients additional options, and the potential for significant advancements in managing their disease.
Dr. Lori Wirth is the Medical Director of the Center for Head and Neck Cancers at Massachusetts General Hospital. Learn more about Dr. Wirth.
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Transcript:
Katherine:
Dr. Wirth, what would you say to patients who are hesitant to participate in a clinical trial?
Dr. Wirth:
Oh, boy. So, that’s such an important question.
Katherine:
Yeah.
Dr. Wirth:
And I think that the natural reluctance to put oneself into an uncertain setting like a clinical trial is completely understandable.
But a couple of things that I would say is first of all there is a lot of really deep work that goes into identifying new agents that have promise in the preclinical setting from laboratories either within the pharmaceutical industry or within academics. The amount of smarts that goes into development new drugs as well as early testing to ensure safety and that there’s a real signal of activity, that amount of work that’s done before a clinical trial is launched is really quite significant. So, when we’re bringing a new drug into clinical trials, we already know that there’s a very good likelihood that that drug is going to have good activity.
Katherine:
Okay.
Dr. Wirth:
The other reason for patients to think about participating in clinical trials is when patients have metastatic disease in the solid tumor setting whether it’s colorectal cancer or breast cancer, unfortunately most of our treatments don’t work so well that there’s a chance of cure. However, if we can’t cure a cancer, the next best thing is to knock it back and hold it at bay for as long as possible so that people can feel well but also live as long as possible.
However, if we don’t have a drug that can work so well that can cure cancer completely many cancers ultimately are going to escape the control, and we’re going to need new therapies for those patients. When patients participate in a clinical trial that’s just giving them a whole other treatment option. And so, to have more options available gives more chances that there’s going to be a real homerun or a real success in terms of treatment.
So, I would much rather have my patient have three options of treatment rather than two options of treatment. And we can always turn to the drugs that we have that are already FDA approved as long as somebody’s well enough to receive cancer treatment. If there’s a promising clinical trial of a new agent that’s only available in a clinical trial, and if we use that earlier in the course of the disease, that gives us more options for down the road.
