Executive Summary

The number of clinical trials for oncology drugs has exploded, but the number of patients enrolling isn’t keeping up. Only a small portion of eligible cancer patients participate in active, interventional oncology trials. There is such a dramatic mismatch between the number of patients sought by drug trials and the number of patients able to enroll in those trials today that 25 percent of cancer trials are withdrawn due to lack of enrollment.

This results in a large negative impact for clinical development organizations as well as patients, as trial participation is strongly correlated with patient survival.

Community treatment centers can play a significant role as a resource for researchers. Not only do these centers represent the facilities where the majority of cancer patients get treatment, they also tend to be much more diverse than populations of cancer patients that seek care at large academic centers. This is important both for expanding access to new treatments for all patients, as well as for drug sponsors since it provides more representative patient populations for their new drug applications.

Read more about the challenges and how researchers are tapping into community treatment centers for clinical research to improve enrollment in their clinical studies in an Applied Clinical Trials article written by the Head of Real World Data Innovation at Medidata.