Patient-Investigator Collaboration Drives Faster, More Impactful Research: Debra Patt, MD, PhD, MBA, MPH

Patient-investigator collaboration helps design more relevant and impactful clinical trials, accelerating the research process to ensure that new therapies reach those who need them in a more timely manner, Debra Patt, MD, PhD, MBA, MPH, told The American Journal of Managed Care^® ahead of the plenary lecture she moderated yesterday at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, titled "Partnership for Progress."

Patt is the executive vice president at Texas Oncology, president of the Community Oncology Alliance, and a member of the American Society of Clinical Oncology Board of Directors.

This transcript was lightly edited for clarity; captions were auto-generated.

Transcript

Why are partnerships between patients and investigators essential to advancing clinical research?

There's an old African proverb: If you want to go fast, go alone, and if you want to go far, go together. I think that really exemplifies what we observe in cancer medicine, that we need collaboration in order to really get the wonderful, powerful molecules into delivery to patients, because we have to solve problems like clinical trial strategy, access to care, care delivery, and operational infrastructure in order to give our Ferraris of therapeutic intervention a highway to drive on. Otherwise, they sit there on a dirt road.

The power of collaboration really accelerates clinical trials, and I think that we've really seen this first in the 1980s during the AIDS epidemic with the ACT UP story; breast cancer was really soon to follow. This is a wonderful story that we're going to talk about today with Dr [Dennis] Slamon and Dr [Barbara] Segarra[-Vazquez]. Dr Slamon, who's really credited with his team developing the Herceptin molecule, and Dr Barbara Segarra, who's a patient advocate, who has really been instrumental throughout the life cycle of advocates being involved in clinical research.

What are the core elements that make a patient-investigator collaboration most effective?

Patient-investigator collaborations are so critical. While they were in their infancy back in the 1980s and really ad hoc, now they are structured ways where advocates are incorporated in the grant review process early on as we think about design elements of clinical trials, as we think about how patients want to be monitored and assessed, how many biopsies a patient has to have, and how far they need to travel.

Those kinds of things—being early on involved in the process and being structurally involved in the grant approval process—have been really important and instrumental in developing the kinds of trials that are necessary. But it's not only in clinical trials. It's also in advocacy because patients being advocates in the public policy space have really accelerated the drug approval process, especially in dangerous and novel disease types. This has been really critical and an important part of innovation in this country.