Cancer Research UK is pleased to sign up to the All Trials campaign, and we welcome the public discussion on how to increase transparency in clinical studies.
As the largest UK funder of academic clinical studies on cancer, we’re absolutely committed to making sure the results of our trials are properly reported, and to ensuring that the people who matter most to us – cancer patients – can derive the greatest possible benefit from the data collected. We believe that information from clinical studies should be published as soon as the results are shown to be reliable.
As well as funding more than 350 clinical studies over the last decade, we also maintain an online database of UK cancer trials, which since 2009 has included trial results. We work with a wide range of organisations, including pharmaceutical companies to ensure that this valuable resource is as comprehensive and up to date as possible, adding plain English summaries of results as and when they are available.
We look forward to helping support all relevant stakeholders in addressing the wider issues of access to clinical trial data, including retrospective data and the results of current and future trials where possible. This is a vital issue, both for researchers, patients and the public.
But it is also something that needs to be appropriately balanced against overly bureaucratic regulation of clinical trials – something we’ve been actively campaign to streamline, both at a national and international level. We believe this is equally as important in improving things for cancer patients as access to study data.
We will be making a fuller comment on our position in our submission to the Science and Technology Select Committee’s inquiry on clinical trials in due course.