• See current children's cancers clinical trials

Cancer research trials are carried out to try to find new and better treatments for cancer. Trials that are carried out on patients are known as clinical trials. Clinical trials continue to be a really important reason why there are better results for curing children’s cancer, compared with just a few years ago. You may wish to ask your child’s doctor about which trials are available.

Clinical trials may be carried out to:

• look at new combinations of existing treatments, or change the way they are given, in order to make them more effective or to reduce side effects
• test new treatments, such as new chemotherapy drugs, gene therapy or cancer vaccines
• compare the effectiveness of drugs used for symptom control
• find out how cancer treatments work
• see which treatments are the most cost-effective. Trials are the only reliable way to find out if a different operation, or type of chemotherapy or radiotherapy, is better than what is already available.

Taking part in a trial

You may be asked for your consent for your child to take part in a research trial. There can be many benefits in doing this. The trials help to improve knowledge about cancer and the development of new treatments. Your child will also be carefully monitored during and after the study. Usually, several hospitals around the UK and increasingly in other countries take part in these trials, which are coordinated by UK oncologists and haematologists. If you agree to your child taking part in a trial, you will be asked to sign a consent form.

Randomisation

In trials looking at whether a new treatment is better than the best available standard treatment, a process called randomisation may be used. A computer will randomly allocate patients to have the different treatments in the trial. This is done so that each treatment group has a similar mix of patients of different ages, sex and state of health.

If it were left to the researchers to decide who should get which treatment, they might be influenced by what they know about their patients. Consciously or unconsciously they might put patients who were more likely to respond to a new treatment into the new treatment group. This would introduce bias, making the results unreliable.

You can ask your child’s doctor to explain this to you in more detail if you would like more information.

Blood and tumour samples

Many blood samples and bone marrow or tumour biopsies may be taken to help make the right diagnosis. You may be asked for your permission to use some of your child’s samples for research into childhood cancer. Some samples may be frozen and stored for future use when new research techniques become available.

The research may be carried out at the hospital where your child is treated, or it may be at another hospital. This type of research takes a long time, so you are unlikely to hear any results. The samples will, however, be used to increase knowledge about the causes of childhood cancer and its treatment. This research will, hopefully, improve the outlook for future children with cancer.

'Wonder cures'

From time to time you may see claims for some new 'wonder cure', often from abroad, in the newspapers or on television. Occasionally the reports are about genuine developments in cancer treatment by reputable people, and as a rule the doctors at your child’s hospital will know something about them. However, some reports can be misleading and give false claims for success. If you have questions about the value of these ‘cures’, you can discuss them with your child’s doctor. Don’t worry that they will be offended by your questions. They will take your questions seriously and give you honest advice.

Children’s cancers are rare and the doctors working in specialist children’s hospitals know about treatments and new research trials going on in other hospitals. In this way, if any better treatment becomes available, everyone is aware and can change. There is also close contact with healthcare staff in the rest of the world, so that everyone is kept up-to-date with progress.