Research Clinical Trials

Why aren't we moving faster in finding effective treatments for breast cancer?

One of the reasons is that advances in treatment depend on a combination of laboratory research and careful evaluation in patients with cancer. New drugs and procedures that look promising in test tubes, and even in mice, have to be evaluated in people. This process is known as a clinical trial. And with so few women with breast cancer participating in clinical trials — only 5% — it takes a long time to collect enough information to decide if a new treatment is better than the current standard treatment.

By comparison, over 90% of children with cancer are treated in a clinical trial setting. Cure rates for children in the early 1970's were one or two out of ten. Today, cure rates are seven out of ten. According to Dr. Anna Meadows, former Director of the National Cancer Institute's Office of Cancer Survivorship, results of these clinical trials also revealed how to distinguish between patients who require more aggressive treatment and those who require less aggressive treatment, with fewer side effects.

Many of you have benefited from clinical trials that first compared radical mastectomy to modified radical mastectomy, and then compared modified radical mastectomy to lumpectomy and radiation, plus other studies that discovered Taxol/Taxotere and Herceptin. These advances were made because thousands of women participated in those trials over the years, giving many of you the benefit of these new treatment options.

You want me to be a guinea pig?

Not at all. Clinical trials provide the best treatment available. According to Dr. Larry Norton of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, people who participate in clinical trials do better than the those who don't.

In fact, participating in a clinical trial is one of the best ways to guarantee good care. Clinical trials are designed to compare a new treatment that has shown promise to the best available treatment. Under very strict scientific guidelines, a clinical trial treats large numbers of patients with either the standard therapy or the new therapy.