The Importance of Clinical Trials

Baptist Health Paducah: The Importance of Clinical Trials

Research coordinator Betty Kuiper, APRN, explains the different types of clinical trials and providing information through these trials may help researchers find cures for disease.

The Importance of Clinical Trials HealthTalks Transcript

Betty Kuiper, APRN, Research Coordinator
The clinical trial is where we offer patients the opportunity to participate in treatment trials for cancer. They can be drug treatment trials. They can be observational studies. Or, they can be biospecimen studies. The biospecimen studies is that the patient consents to give me a sample of their blood, and if they have had a biopsy or surgery, then they consent for me to have tissue. Now the tissue comes after, of course, the pathologist has all they need to take care of the patient. If there’s any extra tumor tissue, then they consent for me to have it. We fly it out fresh, so when the sponsor receives it, it is a fresh specimen. It hasn’t been frozen or anything like that. It’s giving sponsors all over the world that’s doing research to use human blood, human tissue on creating new treatment modalities for cancer care. The reason I would want to encourage people to participate in clinical trials is because there is a cure out there. We just haven’t found it yet. By them participating in the trial, they’re giving us information, their blood and tumor tissue, they’re giving hope to people in the future, where we can map their genomics and their genetics and things like that to give patients hope and, you know, possibly even cure their cancer.