Oncology Featured Articles

31. Are Patient Surveys The Missing Link To Successful Recruitment & Retention? 12/3/2015

    While patient recruitment and retention have been an issue in the delay and expense of clinical trials for decades, patient centricity has at least temporarily moved to the forefront in the clinical space. Although often discussed as two separate issues, there is no question the two are intertwined. Integrating the patient voice in the protocol design process will certainly lead to better recruitment outcomes and patients who are more willing and able to adhere with a study for its duration.

32. How To Increase Patient Enrollment By 600 Percent 11/19/2015

    The process of getting patients to engage in a clinical trial is a headache that will keep many recruitment specialists awake at night. The Cancer Research Institute notes only two to three percent of oncology patients who are eligible for a clinical trial actually participate. Many are not even aware that trials are an option for them. More importantly, 95 percent of cancer patients might be missing out on a potentially lifesaving new treatment.

33. Reduce Turnaround Time For Global Oncology Clinical Trials 10/6/2015

    End-to-end anatomic pathology and histology solutions and the power of biomarkers combine to reduce turnaround time for global oncology clinical trials.

34. Pricing Human Lives…And The Drugs That Save Them 7/8/2015

    As professionals in the pharma industry, we often face questions regarding the high price of medicines and the greed of the companies producing them. Some items are easy to put a price on. Most of the products we use on a daily basis have a price determined by the manufacturing cost plus a profit markup. When you talk about a drug that took 14 years and billions of dollars to produce, the question of price becomes a bit more difficult. That conversation is complicated further when the product in question can ease human pain and suffering, or perhaps even prolong a life.

35. ASCO To Invade McCormick: Clinical Leader and inVentiv Health Have It Covered 5/28/2015

    The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting, is a four day event that will focus on Illumination & Innovation: Transforming Data into Learning. The agenda is jam packed, with sessions covering 21 different tracks, including melanoma, breast cancer, leukemia, pediatric oncology, special sessions, and professional development.    

36. The Fight Against Cancer – Infographic 5/7/2015

    More than twice as many people die from cancer than from AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined.  The World Health Organization (WHO) projects that without immediate action, the global number of deaths from cancer will increase by nearly 80% by 2030, with most occurring in low-and middle-income countries.

37. Intent To Treat Enrichment: A Solution For Better Clinical Trials Of Precision Cancer Medicines 1/6/2015

    As cancer medicine increasingly targets specific molecular abnormalities, more of the anticancer drugs in clinical trials are precision medicines, intended to treat a highly selected niche population of patients.  The opportunity for better treatment creates not only a proposition of needles and haystacks, but of hundreds of different kinds of needles sprinkled through thousands of haystacks. 

38. Clinical Operations Cost Variation: Oncology vs. Non–Oncology 11/25/2014

    The number of products in pipeline within Oncology therapeutic area was 3436 in 2013, which contributes to more than 29% of the total R&D projects.¹ Cancer related cases are also estimated to rise up to 22 million within the next two years.² Keeping these statistics in mind, pharmaceutical companies have earmarked a major proportion of their R&D investment on cancer related research.

    With more oncology clinical trials in the pipeline of most large pharma, there is question of why the operating cost for Oncology trials are higher than that of other therapeutic areas. Let us take a detailed look into this question.

39. The Role Of DCE-MRI In Drug Discovery Support 10/17/2014

    Incorporation of Dynamic Contrast Enhanced (DCE)-MRI modality in clinical trials can contribute to discover more powerful imaging biomarkers, compared to conventional MRI, for assessment of early disease changes and for helping select patients most likely to benefit from drug response.

    • Vascular changes can be observed and quantified with DCE-MRI, which allows earlier assessment of drug efficacy and saves time and money in the drug development process.
    • The use of DCE-MRI in studies increases the study’s discriminative power and helps reduce the number of patients and study sites.
40. “Non-Traditional CROs” Find Solutions While Managing Costs 9/30/2013

     In the 1970’s and 1980’s pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies started to outsource many of the clinical operations services to organizations that have come to be known as contract research organizations (CROs). “Traditional CROs” established themselves by hiring and training employees to manage and monitor clinical trials. The individuals selected included those preferably with a scientific background and were most often fresh out of college or nursing school. The training they received was essential as they lacked experience in a fledgling industry. Strict supervision was also required based on low levels of experience. CRAs with zero to two years of experience made up the majority of the workforce and it was difficult for Traditional CROs to find CRAs with the requisite experience to appoint to studies. Therefore, many organizations sought to have blended teams of the more experienced monitors (3 or more years), along with ‘green staff’ or very inexperienced monitors (0 to 2 years). Many of these organizations were financially successful using this approach, yet it was significantly inefficient in terms of time and client’s budget.