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Study: Cancer Clinical Trials Lag Research

Posted on: Thursday, 1 February 2007, 18:00 CST

Methods for testing sophisticated new cancer candidate therapies have not kept pace with research, a new U.S. study says.

Many experimental cancer drugs fail in the costly final stage, and it could be because clinical trials are difficult to execute correctly in earlier phases, according to the study by researchers at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center appearing in the Feb. 1 issue of the journal Clinical Cancer Research.

We are facing a new and growing problem in clinical trial testing, and that is while the drugs have changed, researchers are still using the same old methods to gauge how effective they are, said the study's lead author, Andrew Vickers, a research methodologist at the center.

The examination of 70 phase 2 studies found that only nine had clearly defined measures for judging a drug's benefit to patients.

Part of the problem, the researchers said, is that it is difficult to accurately pinpoint benchmarks for new drugs. Since many patients are already using other drugs, researchers must first know the effect of those drugs before they can measure the additional effect of a new therapy.

Source: United Press International

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