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Lung Cancer

How Do Clinical Trials Fit into Lung Cancer Management?

Summary & Participants

Clinical trials are important to the development of new lung cancer treatments. How can they help you?

Medically Reviewed On: July 08, 2008

Webcast Transcript

ANNOUNCER: New therapies being tested in clinical trials are yielding important results for early and late stage lung cancer patients.

HOWARD J. WEST, MD: We didn't know, five years ago, that giving chemotherapy after surgery improved survival. In the last few years, we've had multiple trials come out that have really, at this point, proven that chemotherapy, after surgery can improve the cure rates for multiple patients.

ANNOUNCER: Trials have also demonstrated that by administering aggressive treatment after a standard regimen of chemotherapy and radiation late stage or stage III lung cancer patients may live longer.

LUIS RAEZ, MD: If we give you some extra chemotherapy with a different agent that your tumor has not seen before, we can improve your survival from 15 or 16 months that is a standard survival for stage III to maybe 25 or 27 months.

HOWARD J. WEST, MD: These drugs have been approved just in the last three to five years and they are all based on clinical trials that were done in the years before that.

JORGE E. GÓMEZ, MD: Every day, we start more clinical trials with new drugs. There are currently probably more new drugs for cancer and even non-small cell lung cancer than there are old drugs. It's important to remember that every generation of drugs is better, not only works better, works more, kills more cancer, but has less side effects.

LUIS RAEZ, MD: If the patients don't participate in a clinical trial, we will not get these results. We will not move our standards of care forward.

ANNOUNCER: Both early and late stage lung cancer patients are eligible for clinical trials as long as they meet specific criteria.

HOWARD WEST, MD: Overall, the survival of patients who participate in clinical trials is actually superior to that of those who don't participate in trials and why that might be is that we do ensure, on clinical trials, that patients are getting every bit of the current standards, the best standard treatments.

ANNOUNCER: Many patients in a clinical trial receive the standard therapy. Others receive the new treatment.

HOWARD WEST, MD: The patients who participate in these trials may be the beneficiaries of something that will end up being the new standard treatments people can potentially live longer, have their tumors shrink and respond, feel better during that time.

ANNOUNCER: Trials are conducted in three phases.

JORGE E. GOMEZ, MD: Phase I trials are designed to study drugs and to try to reach an optimal dose and to study the toxicity of the drugs. We'll be seeing if the drugs actually work and trying to reach the dose that will be safe for patient treatment.

HOWARD WEST, MD: Phase II trials are ones where we have set on an appropriate dose and we are testing how well this drug or a combination of drugs work in a particular clinical setting.

JORGE E. GOMEZ, MD: In phase III trials, the objective is to compare newer treatments, treatments that have come through phase I and phase II to the standard-of-care treatments.

HOWARD WEST, MD: Half the patients get the standard treatment that we have been doing and half of the patients get the new approach, a new drug, some other change and we try to directly assess whether, in the same kind of patients, one approach is clearly better than another approach.

ANNOUNCER: It's only through the trial process that drugs receive FDA approval. Numerous drugs are currently under investigation. Patients should ask their surgeons and oncologists about participating in clinical trials. Also patients can access a clinical trial database at the website clinical trials.gov.

JORGE E. GOMEZ, MD: All of the advances that we've made in clinical trials have improved the survival of patients with lung cancer. We have patients now, today, who, in the past, would have lived six months who are currently on their sixth or seventh year of treatment with little in terms of side effects with some of the newer drugs.

HOWARD WEST, MD: I don't think that we've reached the best of what we can do. I think that the clinical trials we are doing now will translate to new agents and a refinement of what we have now to still improve the cure rates and improve how well and how long people are living.

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