Are There Enough Volunteers to Run All the Cancer Clinical Trials?
The first sentence of this article caught my eye.
What if you organized an important cancer clinical trial and nobody came? That scenario could become a reality for oncology researchers across the United States, new research shows.
Clinical Trials for Cancer Running Out of Volunteers - Yahoo! News:
The article goes on to say that in order to complete all of the 679 trials at all phases for lung, breast and prostate cancer you would need 238,000 patients. That corresponds to half of all cancer incidences. This means that at least half of people diagnosed with cancer would need to participate in a clinical trial and note that the 238,000 needed only covers breast, lung, and prostate cancer!
I don’t dispute the numbers and based on my experience this is pretty close to true. However, It should be noted that they picked the three types of cancer that have the largest number of trials currently. I do know from a project I was involved in for non-small cell lung cancer it was deemed impossible to get enough patients in the US and western Europe in the required timeframe. Therefore, the trial ended up recruiting world-wide in South America, India and eastern Europe.
Cancer trials tend to be the current trend for a couple of reasons. One, there are some types of cancer that meet the unmet medical need as defined by the FDA and drugs to treat these are given special consideration. A lot of this came about from the AIDS activism in the 80’s. Also, cancer tends to be a highly profitable area for drugs. I’ve not seen recent numbers for drug sales broken down by therapeutic area but I’m sure oncology is high on the list.
The question is what, if anything needs to be done. I tend to think that the numbers aren’t as bleak as it has ben made out to be.
One thing is better education of oncology doctor as to what is available, especially for patients who don’t respond otherwise. Let’s hope this isn’t a trend and merely a momentary decline.
Technorati Tags: drug development, clinical trials
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