Thousands of clinical trials, including new cancer treatments, recruit patients. How to find the most suitable cancer therapy clinical trial fast? Eminent oncologist explains. The challenge is also how to find the correct cancer medication clinical trial. Dr. Anton Titov, MD. Because cancer clinical trials have a goal. They are often sponsored by pharmaceutical company. The goal of cancer clinical trial is to achieve statistical significance for the cancer treatment. This creates a conflicts of interest. It is a challenging situation. Dr. Anton Titov, MD. So how to find the correct cancer clinical trial? Dr. Bruce Chabner, MD. The answer is to go to a cancer center. Go to a cancer center like this one here. We have more than 300 cancer clinical trials going on at any time. We have 80 experimental cancer medications in the process of testing. So your chances of finding the correct cancer clinical trial are good. If you come to cancer hospital like this. We are much better than if you go to a community hospital. You may not find a cancer clinical trial. Not all tumors have such cancer medications. You may have lung cancer or melanoma or colon cancer or breast cancer. Then it is better to look at the availability of cancer clinical trials. Dr. Bruce Chabner, MD. Absolutely! That is a very important point. Because you also mentioned in one of the cancer review articles this. Almost 60% of clinical trials fail to find enough patients. Yes! Only 20% of clinical trials the results are published. This is a huge challenge for sharing the clinical trial data. Yes! We've just started an effort in the "Oncologist" journal. I edit this cancer journal. We encourage cancer patients to submit the data. We will put it into the form of a brief publication. We will do the charts. We will show the data and make it available to everybody. Dr. Bruce Chabner, MD. So that cancer patients that participate in trials can actually see the results. They know there is some benefit that they have given. They made the effort to take part in an experimental clinical cancer trial. That deserves to reach the public eye. It deserves to be there for the use of the scientific community. So that's an important thing. We have to make sure that these cancer clinical trials get published. Dr. Anton Titov, MD. That's amazing. It takes literally decades to get to the point of sharing the data. It is not about just publishing positive data or changing the data. That's where probably Beau Biden Initiative on data sharing comes along. Hopefully. We are working on data sharing. It is a project called Project Data Sphere. We have just described this cancer project in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. This is trying to collect a hundred thousand patient experiences from clinical trials. We will make it publicly available. Dr. Bruce Chabner, MD. So that researchers around the world can go to their computer and pull the data out. They can say. If I had tried my cancer medication in this subset of patients, it might have worked. Dr. Anton Titov, MD. Data sharing in new cancer medications is very very important.
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