Patient Perspectives Drive More Relevant, Feasible Clinical Research: Debra Patt, MD, PhD, MBA, MPH

Patient–physician collaboration is essential to ensure clinical trials reflect both medical priorities and the outcomes that matter most to patients, Debra Patt, MD, PhD, MBA, MPH, noted at last month's San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. However, she cautioned that progress in this area is increasingly threatened by ongoing challenges and changes in clinical trial funding.

Watch part 1 to learn more about why patient–investigator partnerships are critical for advancing clinical research and what makes these collaborations most effective.

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

Transcript

How do patient perspectives enhance clinical trial design, feasibility, and real-world relevance?

When you have doctors collaborating with patients in a room around clinical trials, you have an expert in the disease and you have an expert in the patient. That's really helpful, because the doctor's perspective might be very different in the clinical outcomes that they want to monitor.

For example, for a patient with a grade 2 toxicity, if they're a busy mom, or a teacher, or other things, that grade 2 toxicity may be life-limiting for them. As we all strive for this dream of modern cancer therapy to let patients live without cancer controlling their life and without cancer therapy controlling their livelihood, we know that that livelihood aspect is really important for patients, and those outcomes are going to be escalated in terms of their importance and prioritization in the design of clinical trials. That gets us to the right answer that's meaningful for patients; it also tends to get us there more quickly.

What barriers still prevent equitable and meaningful patient involvement in research?

I've seen, really, over the last 20 years, a great improvement in the collaboration between clinicians and patients in the design of clinical trials. That's been amazing, but there are always threats to progress. I think the challenges and changes in funding to clinical trials and how that impacts academic medical centers and access to cancer therapy are all things that limit the Ferrari of therapeutic interventions' ability to drive on the highway of delivery.

So, we need to make sure to protect that. I'll tell you, as we think about those policies, in my career of working with policy experts, I've never met an elected official who wants cancer patients to do badly in their district. But sometimes people fail to sort of connect some of the policies that we may pass to the impact on patients or the natural consequences of those policies. It's why the engagement of patients is so important to the story, whether it's on the hills of government or in the rooms where the DoD [Department of Defense] is looking at clinical trial approval.