Clinical Trials

Clinical mesothelioma trials rely on the voluntary participation of mesothelioma patients in a healthcare setting to test whether a new treatment option is safe, effective, and better than current standard care. With the help of their doctors, patients decide whether participation in a clinical trial might offer a good treatment choice and whether they personally wish to take part.

When available standard therapy offers little hope of a good outcome, participation in a clinical trial offers early access to new treatments which may yield a positive response to an experimental treatment. Positive clinical trial results can lead to making experimental mesothelioma drugs part of standard mesothelioma treatment.

An excellent overview of clinical trials may be found at the University of California San Diego Cancer Center. A detailed discussion of clinical trials in .pdf format is offered by Cancer Care, a non-profit organization which assists people with cancer through counseling, information, referral, and financial assistance.

Clinical trials are tracked by several organizations. Although no single database is yet comprehensive enough to include all trials, the following contain up-to-date information on most current clinical mesothelioma trials in the United States and several conducted abroad.

* ClinicalTrials.gov is a service of the National Institutes of Health.Enter mesothelioma in the search box.
* PDQ® is the comprehensive cancer trials database of the National Cancer Institute. It allows searching for past closed trials as well as current trials. Results are ordered by trial phase.
For Type of Cancer: Select Mesothelioma
For Version of Results: Select patient
* Dana Farber/Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center maintains a regularly updated database of National Cancer Institute-supported cancer clinical trials taking place in the United States.For Type of Cancer, select the relevant form of Mesothelioma
* Cancer 411 is a non-profit organization which aims to put cancer patients, their families, and doctors in touch with the critical information they need as quickly as possible. Its Clinical Trials search function however, tends to provide results with rewritten study titles, obscuring their identity with results found in other databases.For Type of Cancer, select mesothelioma, malignant.
* Clinical Trials Listing Service™ is a service of CenterWatch, a publishing company that focuses on the clinical trials industry. It lists fewer trials than the above services, but immediately orders them by state and city (note that some trials are performed at multiple locations).