For any type of cancer treatment there are some very important questions to be answered. These include:
- does it work?
- how effective is it?
- how safe is it?
- is it better than existing treatments?
Clinical trials of cancer treatments are scientific studies which are designed to increase our knowledge about those treatments by studying their effects on people and analysing the results.
Clinical trials may be used to look at new treatments that have been developed and tested in the laboratory and which look promising. Or they may be used to find out more about older, well-established types of treatment.
Depending on the question, or questions, that has, or have, to be answered a clinical trial may need anywhere from just a handful of people, studied for a short period of time, to tens of thousands of people, who are followed up for many years.
When a new treatment is discovered the first clinical trials will try to find the best dose to use, what side-effects it might cause and which cancers it might be used to treat. If these early studies suggest that the new treatment might be both safe and effective then further clinical trials are done to find out how good the treatment really is: whether it is better than existing treatments or whether it might offer an extra benefit if it is given along with those treatments.
Many new treatments that are thought to be promising when they are studied in the laboratory prove to be of little value when they are tested in clinical trials. So just because a new treatment is part of a trial does not necessarily mean that it will be as good or better than existing treatments that are already being used.
Some people do worry that clinical trials are using patients as ‘guinea-pigs’ in medical experiments. But these days all clinical trials have to be approved by Ethics Committees which make sure not only that the studies are scientifically correct but that the interests and safety of people taking part in the trials are assured. This includes giving people detailed information about the trial and making sure they give their informed consent to taking part before they begin.
So clinical trials are the best way of working out the benefits (and drawbacks) of any type of cancer treatment and have formed the cornerstone for the progress in improving the results of those treatments over the last 30 years.