Bladder Cancer Clinical Trials
How can I enroll in a clinical trial for a new bladder cancer treatment?
Generally, there are two ways to get involved with clinical trials. The easiest is to ask your doctor. Tell him that you're aware that there are some clinical trials that are going around, whether it's by word of mouth, advertisement, or the Internet, and that you're interested in participating, and can he or she lead you towards one of the investigator sites. The other is, if you want to do it yourself, to go to a website that's sponsored by the government - the National Cancer Institute - you can go to nci.com, or you can google clinicaltrials.gov, and there's a complete listing of all registered trials there. Once you get to that site, they'll ask you what type of cancer, and you just scroll down and put in bladder, they'll ask you what stage; if you know, you can put it in, if not just put in any stage, and just search. What this will do, is in the case of bladder cancer, it'll list the 90 or so actively enrolling sites, and you can look at the type of study. If you can't understand what the studies are about, you can certainly print out the list, take it to your doctor and say, "These are the studies that I found. Am I a candidate for any of these?" When you click on that study, it will list the principal investigator, the sponsor of the study who is actually paying for the study, who's performing the study, and it'll also usually list all the investigators across the nation who are participating in that study, with a brief description of the study itself.
What is a good source of information on bladder cancer?
Another resource for patients would be the AUA website. The AUA is the American Urological Association - you can go to their website, and there are some support groups listed on the AUA website. That is what's also helpful, is that there are certain guidance documents listed on the website, that are accessible to patients in terms of what you expect, or what is to be expected, or the AUA recommendations for treatment of certain conditions. The AUA guidelines for the treatment of superficial or non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer were updated last week, and released at the National Convention in Anaheim, so that is on the website now, and it would certainly be of interest to families dealing with this problem.
Where is the status of the bladder cancer drug EOquin?
Currently, EOquin is in late-stage clinical development. We have started the first of the two Phase Three studies that are going to be conducted. We intend to enrol 600+ patients into each of these studies, and we anticipate to complete these studies in the next three years.
