[Music] What are the misconceptions of placebos in clinical trials? A placebo is a pill or substance that is given to a patient like a drug but has no physical effect on the patient. Placebos can be used as a control to test a new drug. So placebos are really only given in phase three trials. So phase one and two, you're not going to get a placebo. Once you go to a phase three trial, you can be given a placebo in some of the trials because as we mentioned before, that actually helps your data to be more pure when no one really knows who's getting the new drug and who's not. But in those trials you are typically getting a standard of care what the standard is at that time, at minimum. But half the patients will be getting new therapy plus, and that's so we can prove which is better. So it's you're not being harmed by getting the placebo. You may not be getting the new experimental therapy, but we don't know if the new experimental therapy is better than the old therapy. And that's what we're trying to show. How are placebos used in clinical trials? Everyone thinks that when I talk about clinical trials, we're talking about placebos, that only half the patients are going to be getting active treatment. And in truth, placebo controlled trials in myeloma are terribly uncommon because almost no myeloma patient can go without treatment. And if you're studying treatment, the control arm can never be placebo. And in fact, the majority of clinical trials we have at Emory have no control arm. It's just active treatment. Everyone gets the same drugs and we're trying to see if it's of benefit. So the idea that we're doing a lot of placebo controlled trials in myeloma is false. It is in general a very rare thing seen primarily at this spot in patients with smoldering myeloma and MGUS, pre-cancerous conditions that put the patient at elevated risk of developing myeloma, and where the standard of care for most of those patients is not to have any treatment and there a placebo controlled trial. Make some sense. Can placebos be used in cancer trials? Yeah, there are a number of myths about clinical trials, and as I tell my patients, guinea pigs don't have choices. Humans do. And often we think that a clinical trial is the best available choice. Sometimes there's different trials. People can look at different trial availabilities, placebos are not as commonly used in cancer clinical trials, and when they are, it's because there might be an impact, for instance, quality of life or toxicity, and you usually get a standard of care treatment with a placebo and standard of care treatment with another drug. So it's fairly rare to have only placebo as a control arm. Usually it's the standard of care. Sometimes the standard of care is supportive care, and we don't really know of a therapy that works. these trials, with or without placebos, help us advance cancer care, because we know that the therapies of today are built on patients that went on clinical trials and were participants in the past. [Music]
HealthTree • June 11, 2026
