Diverse Clinical Trials Lead to Better Cancer Drugs

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WebMD
What are clinical trials for cancer?

NORMAN SHARPLESS, MD
Clinical trials are really important. It's how we make progress against a certain kind of cancer. We have an idea; we think a new therapy or a new way of treating the cancer will work and help the patient, but we're not sure it will yet. So we have a means by testing new ideas and new therapies in patients through the clinical trials machinery. And that's really how we make progress in cancer.

A big problem we have we clinical trials across the United States is that about less than 5% of patients that are candidates clinical trials go on them.

WebMD
What are the benefits?

NORMAN SHARPLESS, MD
Clinical trials have potential benefits for the patients. So, we usually-- in all cases-- use a clinical trial, where the physicians are not entirely happy with the outcome of the therapy. So the idea is that by doing a clinical trial, we can do better than the standard of care therapy for that disease.

So the potential benefit for the patient is that they can have a better outcome. They can live longer, they can have less side effects, they could be cured of their cancer.

WebMD
Why does diversity matter?

NORMAN SHARPLESS, MD
So we really want to make sure that the populations participating in clinical trials are as diverse as possible.

But clinical trials, by the way, are how we get new therapies into the general population. So we often generalize the results from a clinical trial on a small specific population to the rest of the world. So for a variety of reasons-- for socioeconomic reasons, for language barrier reasons, for germline ethnicity reasons-- all of these issues are important that we have a diverse clinical trials group population that looks like the US population.

WebMD
Why should I consider a clinical trial?

NORMAN SHARPLESS, MD
Clinical trials are carefully designed, highly-researched, and well-thought out. And so we think in all cases the potential benefit outweighs the risk to the patient for participating. Every patient is different. Every stage of the disease is different, and so it's a conversation that they should have with their doctor. But clinical trials, in all cases, will represent at least the best possible care we can do at the time.