The People Behind the Data

In my work in oncology over the past 25 years, I’ve had the privilege of being involved in both research and patient care. These two fields use strikingly different approaches to achieve the same overarching goal—fighting cancer. Research is a tedious process. First, we start in the lab. We test, we tweak, and sometimes we fail before moving forward. Patient care is just the opposite. There is no room for testing or trial and error. When peoples’ lives are at risk, we do everything we can to treat the disease quickly based on what we know and make it go away.

But ultimately, research advances do not exist without people.

When healthcare providers gather together at medical meetings, the highlight is to see the new data. The numbers get the spotlight because they tell us how effective a medicine could be and the side effects it may have.


Unfortunately, time is tight on the podium and we have to display the information in the simplest way possible—we tell the story of averages, medians and hazard ratios. Correlations between investigational medicines and the standard of care are easier to see when you graph them.

At this point, the Kaplan Meier (KM) curve is a familiar sight for many of us. But the numbers don’t share the full story. When I look at KM curves at medical meetings, I don’t see numbers or percentages, I see the patients who participate in clinical studies. When I look at a curve, I see the grandmother who wanted more than anything to live long enough to attend her granddaughter’s wedding. I see the mom diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer just weeks after her second child was born. And I see the young woman, newly engaged, determined to start the next chapter in her life.

Ultimately, these grandmothers, mothers and daughters and their families place their hopes on the possibility that an investigational medicine may be better than what is currently out there—they take a risk to move science forward. At the very least, they contribute to our collective knowledge and by doing so, they help others who may someday face the same diagnosis.

Progress doesn’t happen overnight. We need hundreds, even thousands of people to help us prove if a new medicine works. We only find answers because we are able to find enough people to participate in a clinical trial.

Carla: 1 of 3,000

Carla: 1 of 3,000

Carla was diagnosed with early breast cancer at age 37. She considered chemotherapy, radiation and surgery. But Carla’s doctors presented another option — a clinical trial.

Clinical trials can bring many unknowns into a patient’s journey. There may be travel hardships and treatment schedules need to be reconciled with work and family commitments. There may also be extra tests and appointments, not to mention potential side effects. As people with cancer live longer, it’s becoming increasingly clear that we need to better understand long-term side effects of treatments we study. This means that patients may need monitoring for a long time—perhaps years—so researchers can learn more and aim to advance the standard of care.

As we continue to learn more about patient priorities, researchers can better select trial endpoints, or study goals. For example, measuring quality of life is becoming an increasingly important endpoint as it helps us understand what it’s like to live with the disease, the treatment, as well as any side effects. We also need to be inclusive of a wide range of patients, so that the study is reflective of the people who may one day need the medicine being investigated.

I’m excited about the progress made in cancer treatment over the last few decades, both as a researcher and a clinician. Fifteen years ago, if a woman with breast cancer came into my office, I didn’t have much to offer her. Today, if a new patient comes into my office, I can tell her that we have options and we can work together to treat her individual cancer in the best way possible.

But as researchers and physicians, we can’t take credit.

There are options today because of the brave men and women with the same disease who chose to participate in clinical trials. The people who saw results, along with those who saw their disease get worse or passed away, are the reason we have new treatments. Because of these people, who risked their own lives for the sake of science, we can offer people medicines previously unimagined by the medical community.

The people behind the data – they are the true heroes helping us find the next cancer breakthrough. `QED Mark`