Patients With Thyroid Cancer Can Discuss Clinical Trials ‘From the Get-Go’

For patients with thyroid cancer, it’s never too soon to discuss possible enrollment in a clinical trial, as Dr. Robert Alter of the John Theurer Cancer Center in New Jersey explained in an interview with CURE.

“You can have a conversation with [your team about] clinical trials from the get-go,” said Alter, who is the co-chief of urologic oncology and head and neck oncology at the John Theurer Cancer Center.

Alter sat down with CURE to discuss this topic.

Transcript

When is the right time for patients to discuss clinical trials with their care team?

Scientifically, clinical trials are extraordinary. I mean, we are where we are based upon these clinical trials, and accruing these patients on the clinical trials to enrollment, [there is] success of therapies and, unfortunately, sometimes failure of therapies. You can have a conversation with [your team about] clinical trials from the get-go. So some [patients] can have, by time they come to the medical oncologist, disease progressing after they receive their radioactive iodine therapy under the care of the endocrinologist, and then you get a nodule, they may get a recurrence of a lymph node, but suddenly you have enough documentation that you have a recurrence of disease.

So, I always tell patients, it sounds too scientific but it's just full disclosure, when you come to me we have to review some of your mutational analysis, chromosomal mutations, targets that we can possibly go after in your disease. But at the same time, too, clinical trials can be utilized at your first visit. There are studies from clinical trials that can be newly diagnosed, first-line therapy for thyroid cancer, in which case we don't start them on therapy. We have a phase 1 unit here.

Most patients are apprehensive. [They may think] clinical trials means guinea pig, which means experimental therapy. Some of them are pure experimental, some of them are documented medicines that have been proven to be going through phase 2 clinical trials that prove significant success, and then the study is really the challenging drug, the newer drug, versus the champion, in which case you can do better than what we normally have.

Transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

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