4 Oncology Clinical Trial Facts You Should Know About

While cancer clinical trial design and Veristat processes can give rise to life-changing therapies, the funding is expensive — from costly patient recruitments and care to expensive medical procedures. As a clinical trial owner, you wouldn’t want the heavy funding to go to waste. Instead, you would like the trial to give you better ways to treat and prevent cancer or new effective methods of dealing with symptoms and side effects. 

To achieve that, you need solid clinical trial planning for successful patient recruitment and retention. You’ll also require a working strategy to guide the studies. Additionally, you should understand crucial facts that drive success to your oncology clinical trial, which include: 

Patient Safety is the Top Priority

In research involving 640 phase 3 clinical trials, 17% of them failed due to safety concerns.  The analysis reveals that patients are a vital part of any trial. Without ensuring their safety, your study will fail. However, identifying safety concerns isn’t always straightforward. Every patient has individual issues about the trial that might not align with what physicians are focused on. To detect safety issues earlier rather than later in your trial, ask your patients to report personal effects. You can also have higher-educated nurses to monitor the patients, which lowers death risks and failure to rescue a trial patient in case of adverse effects. Generally, patient safety is a primary concern at each stage of clinical development. After all, patients are the major success drivers in any clinical trial.

Recruiting patients is one thing, retaining them in the trial is another

Patients will be more willing to participate in a trial if they aren’t convinced that they’ll have a chance to get better treatment. However, recruiting a sufficient number of patients is a long-standing problem in trials. Statistics show that recruiting and retaining patients in a clinical trial is difficult. You must have a working strategy to enroll the required number for your trial’s eligibility. For instance, developing trust among study coordinators, patients, and physicians is the key to successful recruitment. To achieve this, clearly inform your patients of all the risks and benefits of the trial. On the other hand, high patient retention demands a nurturing and friendly environment. The recruits must feel welcome by getting treated as individuals, not just a number. Additionally, you can offer a mode of transport to patients traveling a long distance. 

Diversity makes oncology clinical trials better

While every trial has patient eligibility criteria, various groups of people should enroll in oncology clinical trials: old, young, male, female, different races, and ethnicities. Diversity is one of the best ways to make real progress for all kinds of patients. Anyone can get cancer. Enrolling a diverse group of patients helps you learn whether a particular treatment works for everyone or just some people, enabling you to improve care for everyone. 

You must have sufficient resources for a successful trial

While the cost of different clinical development processes varies from discovery to introducing a drug or therapy to the market, clinical trials are generally expensive. In a study involving 640 trials, 22% failed due to insufficient funding. This unfortunate reality cripples most clinical studies by denying them any reasonable opportunity to generate positive outcomes. For this reason, you should have a good source of funds when starting an oncology clinical trial. 

Clinical trials are expensive, time-consuming, and complicated. But knowing some crucial facts about them can help you plan effectively and drive success to your research.