Posts by tag
clinical trials
Curious, Rejected,Accepted: An ESO Fellow’s Road to Becoming an Oncologist
It was 2018, and I was a fifth-year medical student at Yerevan State Medical University. Word spread that our new oncology professor was someone extraordinary: Gevorg Tamamyan - a Harvard-trained, Nature-published pioneer of pediatric oncology in Armenia and president of…
Why Patient-Reported Outcomes are Rarely Used in Trials, and How We Change That
If drug developers design trials to measure how well their drug addresses the issues most important to the target patient community, we could expect to end up with better drugs. Integrating patient-reported outcomes into clinical trials is the way to…
The Kenyan clinical research unit bringing precision cancer medicine to East Africa
Four years ago, clinical trials were little discussed in oncology circles in Kenya. In common with the rest of East Africa, there was no clinical research unit to study treatments for non-communicable diseases such as cancer. No cancer patient living…
Bridging the Age Gap in Breast Cancer: A treatment selection tool for the over-70s
Q. Surgery tends to be a bigger issue for older people, and physicians need reliable guidance on who is likely to benefit and who could be harmed. You looked at selection practices and outcomes at 56 breast units across the…
A silver lining: Could changes forced by the pandemic point to better ways to conduct our clinical trials?
Pragmatic adjustments to trial protocols were seen to be essential during the Covid-19 pandemic to avoid trials being abandoned or delayed. Most changes involved reducing the requirements for travelling to centralised trials centres and reducing the level of reporting requirements.…
Are tumour-agnostic approaches the future for oncology?
According to Francesco Pignatti, Head of Oncology at the European Medicines Agency (EMA), the term ‘tumour agnostic’ is a misnomer. The definition of agnostic in ancient greek, he argues, is ‘lacking in knowledge’. But with these new approaches, it’s not…
The misuse of “noninferiority” in presenting trials is often misleading
When researchers have the opportunity to present their trials at medical meetings, they tend to use not-negative conclusions to discuss formally negative results. A research published in JAMA Oncology by a group of Italian oncologists from the University of Turin…
Evidence-based medicine and precision medicine – irreconcilable or inseparable?
"Medicine cannot be learned quickly, because it is impossible for there to exist any established method in it, as for example when someone who has learned to write in one way that is taught then understands everything. Medicine from one…
Right drug, wrong patient: here’s how we improve our targeting
When it comes to precision and personalised medicine (PPM), clinical practice in oncology takes pride in developing and administering treatments that selectively target components of tumour cells. But, PPM is a model that also takes into account the inherent variability…