Dr Pam Kearns, Deputy Clinical Director of Cancer Research UK Clinical Trials Unit, talks about the importance of children's cancer trials and recent trial activity at the University of Birmingham.
Duration: 5:24mins
Speakers
S1 Dr Pam Kearns, Deputy Clinical Director, Cancer Research UK Clinical Trials Unit
Transcript
S1 Childhood cancer fortunately is actually a very rare disease and it’s of course not one disease, it’s a multitude of different diseases which are different from the cancers that you generally see in adults. In the UK around about 1,500 children a year are diagnosed with cancer and currently the cure rate is around about 75%. So three out of four children are cured of cancer but you need to put that into perspective because it’s still the commonest cause of death and disease in children under the age of 16, so it’s an important health problem. I work at the Children’s Hospital and I sit down with people and tell them that their children have been diagnosed with cancer, this is devastating news and we need to do a lot more so that I can answer the question of ‘can you cure my child?’ to say ‘definitely yes’ in 100% of cases and not just 75%.
Why is it important to conduct trials in this area?
S1 Three out of four children are cured from cancer with our current treatments but we have to remember that that’s not a good enough survival rate. We need to improve children’s cancer survival rates so that we can get 100% survival and the only way we can do that is through clinical trials, through research, and taking new developments into clinical trials. We do clinical trials from early phase studies where we’re looking at new drugs to treat children’s cancer and for the first time actually using them in children which are careful safety trials looking to see whether these drugs are safe in children, right through to big phase three trials where we’re looking at standard treatments and seeing if we can improve that treatment, either by giving standard chemotherapy differently or introducing new drugs and the aim is to get better treatments that will become the new gold standards that not only improve survival but reduce side effects of treatment.
What type of trials do you run?
S1 So the types of trials that we do range from anything from an early phase trial and a recent one that we’ve just completed at the University of Birmingham Trials Unit is the Cloud Study. The Cloud Study was for children with acute myeloid leukaemia that was resistant to all current treatment and we were testing two new drugs – one called clofarabine and another one called liposomal daunorubicin – and combining them for the first time, testing it in children. We showed in that trial that that was a safe and effective combination that we now want to take forward into trials, bigger trials, to see if it’s effective or more effective than current treatments. So that’s a closed trial now and we’ve just launched a new trial called the UKALL 2011 Trial. This is a trial for children with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia is the commonest type of cancer in children. 25% of cancer diagnosis in treatment is this disease. The survival rate for this disease is 80% but children are treated with the current treatments suffer quite long-term side effects. So the aims of the current trial is to improve the treatment for those two out of ten children that don’t survive at the moment, so improve their survival rate, but also reduce the side effects of the treatment for the rest of the children who are currently cured from this disease.
Why Birmingham?
S1 It was a great achievement to establish the Children’s Cancer Trials team here in Birmingham and we’re perfectly situated here to improve clinical trials for children with cancer. This is because the Cancer UK Clinical Trials Unit has been running trials for 25 years and has a wealth of expertise in adult trials that we can now bring to children’s trials for improving their standards. The Trials Unit isn’t isolated. The University of Birmingham has the largest density of clinical trials units I think than any other academic institution and that all comes together under the umbrella organisation of the Birmingham Centre for Clinical Trials and together we can build on the expertise of lots of other units to take children’s cancer trials forward to a much higher standard in the future.
What are the future challenges for trials?
S1 Our biggest challenge for children’s cancer trials is the small numbers, trying to develop clinical trials to answer questions in a timely fashion with small numbers of patients and this is a challenge that’s actually coming to adult cancer trials now too with personalised medicine. The types of questions we’re asking in clinical trials are focused on small numbers of patients so to take this forward we need to develop new statistical methodology to be able to answer those questions much more effectively. But in addition to that, we can’t isolate trials in one area. In children’s cancer we do trials across the whole of the UK and we have to collaborate internationally and that in itself is a huge challenge in terms of the regulations and also funding and that I think is what we have to look towards in the next decade, is to how we can effectively run international – not only European but global – trials that answer questions for rare diseases.
End of recording