Blood Cancers Forum Focuses On Importance Of Clinical Trials
On February 28, the third annual Texas Forum on Blood Cancers was held in Dallas. One major topic of the forum was the importance of clinical trials for treating blood cancers such as multiple myeloma.
The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) is currently supporting research and clinical trials through its Therapy Acceleration Program, which began in 2008. The program helps fund new research and clinical trials and also joins forces of the private sector and academic researchers.
Clinical trials are important to understanding and fighting any disease. Fredrick B. Hagemeister, MD, professor of medicine in the Lymphoma and Myeloma Center at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, gave an example of the importance of clinical trials. He related the details of a Velcade (bortezomib) clinical trial, which showed that one-tenth the dose is better because of its lower toxicity, but a low dose administered more frequently was more toxic than a high dose administered less frequently.
“You wouldn’t be able to guess that unless you actually did a trial,” said Hagemeister. “You wouldn’t be able to actually understand that or know that, and that’s why we conduct clinical trials.”
Currently, there is a growing concern to attract more participants for clinical trials. A strategy discussed at the forum to raise the number of patients involved in clinical trials is moving clinical trials into community hospitals. Since many patients choose to be treated at their local community hospitals rather than at more inclusive cancer centers or larger hospitals, performing clinical trials at local hospitals will make the patients more comfortable and willing to participate. In order to facilitate these trials across a number of local community hospitals, networks of researchers and physicians work together in multi-center trials.
Other information sessions during the forum focused on continuing and delayed effects of treatments, the possibilities of relapse, and combination therapies, as well as information from the 2008 meeting of the American Society of Hematology.
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It would seem to me that part of the problem with enrolling patients in clinical trials is that if a drug company is sponsoring them medicare/retiree health plans will not pay any portions of the costs.
My understanding is that Medicare will only pay on clinical trials sponsored by the National Cancer Institute.
If the above is true it becomes even more restrictive than driving a couple of hundred miles to participate in a trial.