Tuesday, December 19, 2017

Cancer clinical trials exclude many desperate patients. Should that change?




When 29-year-old Carly Bastiansen was diagnosed in January 2016 with advanced pancreatic cancer, doctors told her a clinical trial was her best shot at slowing the notoriously quick-killing and hard-to-treat disease. She found one that appeared promising and went through the screening process. But the trial would not accept her.

“Participating in a clinical trial is really my only chance at living longer,” Bastiansen, a children’s librarian in Baltimore, said this fall as she was growing weaker. “To have had that option taken off the table was devastating.”



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