Education & Recruitment in Metastatic Breast Cancer Clinical Trials

Our goal is to improve outcomes for patients with metastatic breast cancer (MBC) by educating them about clinical trials.  We will provide multi-media tools to facilitate physician-patient communication and help patients make informed treatment decisions. 

Clinical trial participation is particularly important for metastatic patients who may have fewer treatment options as they exhaust previous lines of therapy. However, only 3-5% of adult cancer patients participate in clinical trials, and more than 90% of these participants are Caucasian.   Clearly, we need more clinical trial participation across the board, and especially among racial and ethnic minorities.

We will develop culturally, linguistically, and socially sensitive pamphlets and videos which dispel the most common myths and fears regarding clinical trials.  We will recruit a diverse group of our patients to participate in the creation of these tools in order to provide the most effective approach to reach future patients.  The target population is women with MBC, particularly racial and ethnic minorities within this group. 

We will use surveys to measure the success of the program.  We will determine whether the provided decision aids taught patients important facts about clinical trials, and whether the aids were deemed helpful by patients and physicians.  We will assess clinical trial enrollment before and after the intervention, and gather information from patients who accepted and declined clinical trials to better understand their reasoning.

By offering this important information through a patient’s perspective, we aim to increase clinical trial accrual and ultimately improve care of metastatic breast cancer patients.