Posted Aug 5, 2009
A lack of adult cancer-study volunteers is hurting U.S. efforts to find causes and then prevent, diagnose, treat and cure the disease class, a researcher says.
“To me it was obvious,” cancer researcher and health economist Scott Ramsey told The New York Times, recalling when he first brought up the topic at a January 2008 meeting of a panel that reports to the U.S. president on the National Cancer Program.
“We can’t improve survival unless we test new treatments against established ones,” said Ramsey of Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
Just 3 percent of adult cancer patients participate in studies of cancer treatments, mostly new drugs or drug regimens, Ramsey said.
“Why aren’t we getting cures?” he asked rhetorically. “This is one of the biggest reasons.”
More than 6,500 cancer clinical trials are looking for adult patients and many will be abandoned, the Times said.
More than one trial in five sponsored by the National Cancer Institute failed to enroll a single subject — and only half reached the minimum number needed for a meaningful result, Ramsey and colleague John Scoggins wrote in The Oncologist.
Many trials that do get under way are often useless because they’re too small and sometimes not exact enough from which to draw conclusions, the researchers said.
Other studies, by companies, are designed to persuade doctors to use their drugs, the researchers said.
Still others ask questions like whether it makes a difference to give a drug every nine days or every two weeks, which may have value but “are not going to provide the next breakthrough,” University of Chicago oncologist Richard Schilsky told the Times.
Date: Aug 3, 2009 URL: www.upi.com