Research – clinical trials

• See current Kaposi’s sarcoma trials

Research into new ways of treating Kaposi’s sarcoma is going on all the time. Cancer doctors are continually looking for new ways to treat the disease and they do this by using clinical trials. Many hospitals now take part in these trials. CancerBACUP can give you information about current trials and tell you how to contact the appropriate organisation or doctor.

If early work suggests that a new treatment might be better than the standard treatment, cancer doctors will carry out trials to compare the new treatment with the best available standard ones. This is called a controlled clinical trial and is the only reliable way of testing a new treatment. Often several hospitals around the country take part in these trials.

So that the treatments can be compared accurately, the type of treatment a patient receives is decided at random – typically, by a computer – and not by the doctor treating the patient. This is because it has been shown that if a doctor chooses the treatment, or offers a choice to the patient, they may unintentionally bias the result of the trial.

In a randomised controlled clinical trial, some patients will receive the best standard treatment while others will receive the new treatment, which may or may not prove to be better than the standard treatment. A treatment is better either because it is more effective against the tumour or because it is equally effective and has fewer unpleasant side effects.

The reason why your doctor would like you to take part in a trial (or study as they are sometimes called) is because until the new treatment has been tested scientifically in this way, it is impossible for doctors to know which is the best one to choose for their patients.

Before any trial is allowed to take place it must have been approved by an ethics committee. Your doctor must have your informed consent before entering you into any clinical trial. Informed consent means that you know what the trial is about, you understand why it is being conducted and why you have been invited to take part, and you appreciate exactly how you will be involved.

Even after agreeing to take part in a trial you can still withdraw at any stage if you change your mind.

Your decision will not affect your doctor’s attitude towards you. If you choose not to take part or you withdraw from a trial, you will then receive the best standard treatment rather than the new one with which it is being compared.

If you do choose to take part in a trial, it is important to remember that whatever treatment you receive will have been carefully researched in preliminary studies before it is fully tested in any randomised controlled clinical trial.

CancerBACUP has a section on clinical trials which explains clinical trials in more detail.