AML Clinical Trials | When to Consider This Treatment Option
How do clinical trials fit into an AML treatment plan? Dr. Eric Winer highlights the importance of clinical trials to advancing AML therapies and encourages discussing your options and trial eligibility with your care team.
Dr. Eric S. Winer is Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Clinical Director of Adult Leukemia at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Learn more about Dr. Winer.
|
Elevate | Expert Advice for Accessing Quality AML Care and Treatment |
Elevate | What You Should Know About Your Role in AML Treatment and Care Decisions |
Transcript:
Katherine Banwell:
When considering treatment options, where do clinical trials fit into the plan?
Dr. Eric Winer:
I think clinical trials are extraordinarily important. The way that I think many of us think about this is we want to continually do better, and have our patients continually have improvements. The only way we can do that is by bringing forth novel medications in order to gain that extra improvement. As mentioned, all of these small molecule inhibitors, every drug that we have out there, started off as clinical trials.
We were able to gain benefit, and patients are able to gain benefit by taking part in these clinical trials. Not all clinical trial is successful to be fair, and different types of clinical trials have different scientific knowledge beforehand. For example, Phase I clinical trials tend to be more experimental. We don’t know as much about the drugs.
Phase III experimental clinical trials are much more well-known. Then there are a bunch in between in terms of Phase I’s where we know the drug, but we’re studying more of a combination, but of these clinical trials, the purpose of this is to gain benefit.
If we didn’t have a drug that we believed was going to be helpful, we wouldn’t be doing that clinical trial. So, while some people may think of these things as experimental, I think of them as rationally evaluating a way to target particular forms of leukemia to gain better responses.
Katherine Banwell:
If a clinical trial isn’t offered, how can patients inquire about their potential options?
Dr. Eric Winer:
The first thing to do is speak to their physician. Many physicians, if they have clinical trials, they’ll know the eligibility. They’ll know who is and isn’t eligible, and why they’re not eligible. That’s something that can be easily explained to people. The second thing is if there aren’t clinical trials available at that institution, then it’s important for the patients to talk to their clinicians, and say, is there a clinical trial available someplace else that might be good for me.
Many of us field calls from other physicians, from other colleagues, who call us and say, “Hey, I have a patient with this particular disease. Do you have a clinical trial available?” We’re always willing to collaborate. The one nice thing about the leukemia field is it’s a relatively small field. We all know each other. We all realize that the purpose of this is to make patients better. And so, we all share information, and we all work together to try to get that accomplished.
Katherine Banwell:
There are a couple of really good websites available too, to find out about clinical trials, correct?
Dr. Eric Winer:
There are, and I think that by contacting different institutions that can be helpful, such as the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society is a good one. There is a national clinical trial database called clinicaltrials.gov.
Those are all very important, but sometimes they can be a little difficult to navigate. And so, it’s always good to go back to your physician or your physician team and discuss these things to make sure that the clinical trial that someone is looking at is actually an applicable clinical trial for them.
