Community Oncologists Should Get Involved in Clinical Research

The recent Miami Breast Cancer Conference was a combined virtual and live meeting, providing an opportunity for breast cancer specialists from all disciplines to learn about emerging therapeutic strategies that they can translate into clinical practice. During one session, conference co-chair Anees Chagpar, MD, MBA, MPH, of the Yale Institute for Global Health in New Haven, Connecticut, discussed getting involved in clinical research.

In this exclusive MedPage Today video, Chagpar offers her topline takeaway from her talk.

Following is a transcript of her remarks:

The takeaway from that talk was really that everybody can get involved in clinical research and there really should be a mandate for people to get involved, because that’s how we move the field forward.

You know, sometimes we think that clinical research is the domain of the people who live in the ivory tower and the academics who write the papers. But we have to recognize that community surgeons are a big part of the research engine. Community oncologists, people who see a lot of patients, may not have the time to think of the trials, but certainly can put patients on them.

And the other piece is that they may be very academically driven. Even though they may not be writing that NIH R01 or publishing in the New England Journal, a lot of the breast centers around the country, there’s now a mandate from the NAPBC, the National Accreditation Program for Breast Centers, that high-quality centers put at least 2% of their eligible patients on clinical trials. And that doesn’t have to be a randomized controlled trial. It can be any kind of a research project.

And so really my take-home message in that talk was, if you have a question, something that comes up at your tumor board, you’re thinking about a patient, you’re discussing a topic with a colleague and you’re kind of flummoxed about, what do we do in this situation? Those are great questions.

And oftentimes you can answer them yourself by designing a study and whether that’s a retrospective, let’s go back and see what are the data that we’ve collected at our institution, or gather together some friends to look at that, or whether that’s designing a prospective trial, or whether you’re interested in looking at what practice patterns are and you want to design a survey, or whether you want to partner with an academic institution on a clinical trial or a study that they’re doing.

Research is really one of those things that, kind of like the COVID tagline — we’re all in this together. And, you know, we need to continue to move the field forward.