Clinical cancer trial recruitment has plummeted by 60% during the Covid-19 pandemic, leading to fears that treatment options will narrow, and new research will become more limited in scope. The Pharma Times reports that experts are calling for access to clinical trials for cancer patients to be extended.
The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) has recently published new figures which show that during 2020/21, the number of cancer patients recruited into clinical trials for cancer in England was 27,734, compared to an average of 67,057 over the previous three years.
The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) claim that the pandemic has exacerbated existing issues with clinical cancer trials, rather than being wholly to blame for the current situation. This raises concerns that innovative new therapies and technologies may be stifled, and that current cancer patients may not benefit from the best options that are available.
Several issues have been identified which limit patient access to clinical trials. These include an unnecessarily cumbersome administrative process for setting up trials, particularly for biomarker-driven studies. There is currently no rapid genetic system in place within the NHS to select patients for precision medical trials.
Professor Nick James, professor of prostate and bladder cancer research at The Institute of Cancer Research, London said: “Clinical trials are the single best way to turn advances in science into patient benefits.”
He added: “But trial recruitment has plummeted during the pandemic, slowing the pipeline of new treatments and robbing people with cancer access to potentially life-saving medicines. We need urgent investment in the COVID-19 recovery of clinical trials, and to get funding to those centres that at the moment are struggling to support clinical research.”
A further barrier to recruitment is the poor quality of information about the trial process that is available to both patients and doctors. What information there is, is often out of date, difficult for patients to understand, and fragmented across different formats and platforms. Regional funding levels for clinical research is also very variable.
The ICR is calling for immediate investment in cancer clinical trials, to restore pre-pandemic levels, and ensure that new research can progress swiftly. It also suggests that the fast-moving pace of the Covid-19 vaccines research, development, and trials can be learned from, and the same methods applied to boost cancer research.
The clinical trial process should be embedded early in the patient pathway, and seen as a routine course of action, rather than a last resort, the ICR recommends. There should be a ‘levelling up’ campaign, to address the current postcode lottery in accessing the right care.
Patients in rural and poorer areas, and ethnic minorities, are those who currently have the least access to trials. This can be addressed by ensuring that staff trained in oncology, radiology, and pathology, are located in more hospitals across the UK, and that specialists have more time to carry out research and development.
Finally, the ICR calls for information about trials to be made more widely accessible, centralised in one place, kept regularly updated, and made more easily understandable.
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