The idea of finding and participating in a clinical trial can seem daunting. We are here to help. Read here about clinical trials, how they work, why they are important, and how to find a trial that may be right for you.
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June 2020
Telemedicine in Clinical Trials
COVID-19 brought telemedicine, sometimes called telehealth, to the forefront of healthcare. But it’s been available in some health practices for several years.
“Telemedicine” is the practice of seeing your doctors virtually from wherever you are. During the pandemic, many doctors switched to “seeing” patients by phone or video chat, as long as the patient’s needs could be met. Less certain was how telemedicine could be used to keep monitoring people enrolled in clinical trials.
Below, you’ll find resources that discuss how telemedicine may be used in drug trials, and how it might lead to faster, more efficient, and more diverse trials. You’ll also find a link to listen to an expert discuss how telemedicine may be the future of clinical trials.
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Metastatic Trial Search (MTS) is a clinical trial search tool designed specifically for patients with metastatic breast cancer. The patient-friendly trial search interface and trial summary make it easy for you to find a clinical trial and understand what researchers are studying, why, and who can take part. To make it even easier for you, we recently added a new feature to MTS that enables you to narrow your search results by different trial types. Try it now!
It is available on 23 breast cancer advocacy websites so you can use MTS on your favorite community website. This month we highlight MTS on Metastatic Breast Cancer Alliance.
Our Partners
Our partner organizations share our commitment to helping metastatic breast cancer patients learn about and participate in clinical trials. They host Metastatic Trial Search on their websites, provide content for Metastatic Trial Talk, and provide valuable feedback for continuous quality improvement. We are proud to work with the following organizations:
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Together called eligibility criteria, inclusion and exclusion criteria outline who can and cannot participate in a trial. This month we share why these criteria are important, as well as about current challenges and efforts to optimize eligibility criteria.
As a woman or man living with metastatic breast cancer, you may have thought about whether a clinical trial would be a good option for your care. But if your doctor has never talked to you about clinical trials, you may not know when or how to broach the subject.
Below you can find tips on how to talk to your doctor about clinical trials as well as checklists of questions to ask your doctor that you can bring with you to your next appointment. If your doctor doesn’t want to talk to you about clinical trials, you may want to consider getting a second opinion from another doctor. (You can learn more about how to get a second opinion in the September 2019 MTT.)
Additional checklists on How to Talk to Your Doctor:
Many people diagnosed with cancer never consider entering a clinical trial. Yet clinical trials provide unique opportunities to receive high-quality care while contributing to the research that is necessary to determine the effectiveness of new cancer treatments. Hearing patients’ and doctors’ personal opinions and experiences can help you think about whether and when to consider a clinical trial as part of your cancer care. Below you can:
Watch the Cancer Support Community’s “In Their Own Words.” In this video series, doctors and people living with cancer discuss their experiences with cancer clinical trials.
Watch the Cancer Support Community’s “A Story of Hope,” which includes a range of cancer patients talking about the decisions they faced when considering whether and when to enter a clinical trial.
Read an interview with a breast cancer advocate conducted with an oncologist about how clinicians learn about clinical trials.
Watch an ACT video that includes doctors talking about what patients need to know about clinical trials.
There’s often a lot of information to review when you are considering whether to enroll in a clinical trial. One of the most important is the phase of the clinical trial. Knowing the phase will give you insight into the focus of the trial: safety and dosage, effectiveness and short- and long-term side effects.
Learn more about the phases of a clinical trial in these articles:
Metastatic Trial Search tip: You can search by trial phase on Metastatic Trial Search
Entering a clinical trial may be an option for many women and men with metastatic breast cancer. As you decide whether to enter a trial, you may want to hear multiple perspectives on clinical trials.
This month, we feature an overview of clinical trials as well as two webinars on metastatic clinical trials–one from the patients’ perspective and one from the oncologists’ perspective.
We also have included a video about the importance of research and clinical trials that features patient advocate Karen Durham. Karen died in March, a few months after the video was made. You can read more about her and her advocacy on the Komen website.
Learn more about why more patients will be eligible for clinical trials. It’s also important to know if outcomes and side effects differ based on a participant’s sex, race or age group. The FDA’s Drug Trials Snapshots allows you to see who took part in the clinical trials that led to a drug’s approval and what, if any, differences were seen. And Cancer Today, pulls it all together in this feature on efforts to increase the number and type of participants in clinical trials.
