A survey of 61 patients with cancer suggests that many patients are willing to undergo extra tests to participate in clinical trials that will give them access to experimental cancer treatments that may offer improved outcomes and potentially increased survival options.
The team of researchers from the Mayo Clinic, Scottsdale Healthcare, AZ, and the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Phoenix suggests that these results may help increase support for personal medicine research that is focused on targeted therapies that require specific testing to identify a subset of patient populations with a particular genetic makeup that would benefit from these treatments.
“This is the first study of its kind where patients themselves were asked what tests and medical imaging studies they would be willing to undergo while participating in clinical studies for their cancer. Patients also were asked how invasive they perceived such tests and studies,” said lead author Raoul Tibes, MD, PhD, a hematologist/oncologist at the Mayo Clinic Cancer Center. Patients appear to be willing to ignore the extra burden of even invasive testing in the hope of receiving advanced experimental therapies that are often not available outside of clinical trials. The study is scheduled to appear in July in Cancer.
“This is important information, because it tells us that we can design clinical studies that ask patients to give extra tumor biopsies. But we need to carefully judge how many biopsies we request and what molecular tests we do with the tumor sample,” said coauthor Mitesh J. Borad, MD, Associate Director of Phase I Drug Development, Mayo Clinic, AZ.
