The Benefit of Clinical Trial Enrollment for Patients With Cancer

There are a number of reasons why patients with cancer are encouraged to enroll in clinical trials, Dr. Michael J. Pishvaian explained in an interview with CURE.

“Any clinical trial where these patients are being monitored very, very closely can be of benefits to the patient and to the population at large,” said Pishvaian. Based at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C., he is the director of Gastrointestinal, Developmental Therapeutics and Clinical Research Programs for the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center in the Greater Washington Area and an associate professor at the School of Medicine. 

Pishvaian sat down with CURE to discuss some of the reasons why patients would enroll in clinical trials, including increased monitoring from study teams and access to new, novel therapies.

Transcript:

I always encourage patients to participate in clinical trials because there are several benefits that are a bit more subtle. One significant benefit is that patients enrolled in clinical trials are monitored much more closely. They typically have multiple study team members involved in their care. Studies have shown that patients have better outcomes when they're enrolled in a clinical trial because they have more eyes on them, so to speak, taking care of their cancer.

Of course, there's the most basic reason: many of the drugs being tested, particularly the novel therapies, are only available in clinical trials. I keep coming back to the KRAS inhibitors. It's been incredibly frustrating that none of them are FDA approved yet. So, we are, quite frankly, working hard and seeking slots to be able to place our patients on these clinical trials, anywhere in the country they can get a slot. Sometimes, it's simply an access issue that drives our desire to do clinical trials.

The other benefit of clinical trials is that we learn from them, even if the drug doesn't work for the entire group of patients. For example, there may be a trial that enrolls 100 patients, and for 97 of them, it doesn't work, but for three of them, it does. Investigating why it helped those three patients can sometimes be transformational.

In fact, there's a class of drugs in lung cancer—I'll borrow from my lung cancer colleagues—that was intended for a certain type of biomarker called C-MET. It didn't work at all, but they realized that for the few patients for whom it did work, it worked amazingly well. And it turned out that those patients had a specific fusion gene called an ALK fusion, for which the drug worked remarkably well. And that really opened up a whole new avenue for therapy for lung cancer. So, any clinical trial where patients are being monitored very closely can be of benefit to both the patient and the population at large.

Transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

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