Caregivers: An Untapped Resource for Clinical Research By Hannah Eccard, MA Caregivers provide substantial support to the health and well-being of patients in the US. One of their contributions involves helping patients search for, and participate in, clinical trials. Caregivers turn to Inspire for help finding and accessing clinical trials. My father [...]
Merck’s Patient-Centric Clinical Trial Recruiting By Kathleen Hoffman, PhD MSPH Merck boosts clinical trial recruitment with a patient-centric mindset Everyone in pharma knows that product success depends on the results of clinical trials -- but we don’t usually hear from the people who are involved in running them. Recently, four Clinical Research [...]
Do Patients Care About What Your Drug Does? By Sara Ray, MA Be sure the trial outcomes echo the patient voice, article says In most randomized pharmaceutical clinical trials, researchers are looking for a statistically significant performance difference between the two courses of therapy. But which is more important to the [...]
Clinical Trials and PROs: What Patients with Rare Diseases Say By Kathleen Hoffman, PhD MSPH Challenges to developing clinical trials for rare diseases begin with their rarity – each condition affects fewer than 200,000 Americans. Approximately seventy-five percent of those affected by rare diseases are children. It is estimated that 80 [...]
What Members Tell Each Other About Clinical Trials By Kathleen Hoffman, PhD MSPH "Failing to enroll a sufficient number of subjects in a trial is a long-standing problem"1 but understanding the factors impeding enrollment can be difficult. Public posts on social media are an effective resource for understanding how patients feel [...]
Are You Listening to Patients? Patient Preferences and Clinical Trial Design By Kathleen Hoffman, PhD, MSPH Last fall, over 1500 Inspire members living with sarcoidosis, scleroderma, ovarian cancer, prostate cancer, colorectal cancer, arthritis and psoriasis, completed a survey on exploring patient preferences and insights on clinical trials. Our recent webinar, "A Hopeful [...]
The Patient Is Speaking: 5 Benefits of Patient Focused Drug Development Sponsors and CROs Need to Know By Sara Ray, MA Since the 2012 FDASIA reauthorization of the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA) and the 21st Century Cures Act ‐‐ Directing and Enabling Patient Focused Drug Development in 2016, integrating the [...]
Federal Agency Perspectives on Clinical Trial Eligibility: Spring 2018 “Most current [breast cancer] clinical trials only enroll what I call the metastatic cancer ‘Olympians:’ the healthiest of the dying, those who are on their first or second line of therapy, who have limited metastases, who don't have brain mets, who don't have [...]
Introducing Inspire Recruit Commonly discussed statistics on patient enrollment and retention in clinical research paint a bleak picture. Clinical trial on-time completion rates are low--only around 20%. This is due in part to the fact that 85% of clinical trials fail to retain enough patients.1 The causes may lie in the low [...]
Finding Patients with Rare Cancers Quickly Almost one-third of all cancer deaths are caused by rare cancers but rare cancers represent only between 23.4% and 27% of all cancer cases.1 Between 25 and 30 million Americans and around 30 million people in the European Union live with rare diseases.2 Rare cancers are [...]
