Rose Gerber on How Structural Barriers Create Access Issues for Clinical Trial Participation

Rose Gerber, director of patient advocacy and education for the Community Oncology Alliance, discusses how different structural barriers create access issues for patients looking to participate in clinical trials.

How do different structural barriers create access issues for patients looking to participate in clinical trials?

It’s very interesting because when clinical trials are developed, they’re clearly developed to test a certain theory, to determine if a certain outcome is going to be positive. But, what happens is sometimes a criteria is so narrow it could actually exclude patients it could benefit. For example, in the metastatic breast cancer population, a lot of times these are individuals that want additional treatment and they want to continue to be on a trial but because they have a prior disease, they’re excluded from a lot of the clinical trial that are out there, and that can apply to various disease states as well, not just breast cancer.