Mesothelioma Clinical Trials

What are Clinical Trials?
A clinical trial is a type of medical research that focuses on the effects that treatments have on patients. These carefully planned scientific studies help doctors select the safest, most effective approaches to cancer treatment.
The basic question asked in any clinical trial is: “Is this treatment better and safer than the treatment(s) currently used to treat this disease?” New medical breakthroughs, which improve the lives of many people, emerge because they have been tested in clinical trials and found to be helpful.

Many forms of treatment are tested in clinical trials. New chemotherapy drugs, surgical and radiation techniques, vaccines, and biological therapies are a few of the treatments currently being studied in clinical trials as possible treatments for all types of mesothelioma. Clinical trials often involve adding a new treatment after standard treatment has been given.

Before any chemotherapy treatment is tested with patients it is studied first in tissue culture in the laboratory. If it is determined to be potentially effective, it is next tested with animals. Finally, it is tested with people.

Participating in a clinical trial gives a patient a chance to participate at the cutting edge of medicine and gain access to novel therapies, new chemical weapons, and advanced techniques not yet available to everyone. The development of new treatments for illness is a complicated, expensive, and time consuming process. This is made even more so by the risks inherent in trying "unproven" treatments. Clinical trials are not the beginning of the research process, but are often the last steps before a drug, procedure, or tool can be released to the medical community as safe to use.

Research into new drugs and procedures doesn't involve human patients until a lot of work has already been done in the lab. In vitro (test tube) testing of drugs is followed by in vivo (in the body) tests using animal models to evaluate the treatment. Just as major surgical advances such as open heart surgery, heart, liver, kidney and lung transplants were first perfected on animals, so too are new drugs developed and tested, first in the lab and then on special animal models that mimic human systems. This is done to ensure that new treatments can be tolerated and have a measurable effect. None of these early steps are to be confused with clinical trials, and patients should never feel they are being "guinea pigs" by consenting to a clinical trial.

Clearly, it is impossible to assure that new drugs or procedures are safe or will work in humans if they are never tried on volunteers under carefully controlled conditions. The purpose of each step of the clinical trial is to validate that a treatment is tolerable, that it has an effect worth pursuing, and that it is equal to or better than existing treatments. Roughly speaking, this represents the three phases of clinical trials that are open to patients.