Why are clinical trials important?

[Music] Why are clinical trials important? They're important because we can't have any new therapies without trials. And most of our ideas fail in clinical trials. So if we just went by what we think is going to work, we're going to be wrong the vast majority of the time. So you have to actually prove that what you think is right is actually right, and that's how we move the ball forward in any type of ecology. The reason that clinical trials are so important and the reason that we encourage patients to talk to their doctors about participating in clinical trials is that every standard of care that we have today was a clinical trial yesterday. Clinical trials are a way to get into the newest and potentially the best treatments better than what we have now.
And also, while you're helping yourself, while you're getting access to those new treatments, you're also helping the guy or the gal in the waiting room and the people who are going to follow in her footsteps down the road. One of the stories that I like to tell is
related to a treatment for lymphoma called Chop. Chop, and that's a chemo regimen that's been around for a long time. Very effective, curative in some cases, even for people with lymphoma. And what I like to tell people is we didn't have CHOP until we had CHL and we didn't have CHL until we had CH and we didn't have CH until we had C And to get to that CHOP to get to that curative treatment, the clinical trials that built on one another are the way we got to that, to that finish line. And I'd really like to see us get to that point in myeloma as well. So clinical trials are our vehicle, not all clinical trials are the same. It's important to know the phase. It's important to know the purpose of the study. It's important to know if there's a placebo involved. And those are things you really need to have a good relationship with your physician, really be an advocate for yourself, learn all you can and make the right decisions. How have clinical trials helped get the treatments we have today? Every FDA approval is based on hundreds, if not thousands of patients coming before taking a chance on a treatment. Sometimes when the other arm does not involve that treatment. And the only way to make improvements, sometimes they're just small improvements, sometimes not terribly consequential to each patient. But on mass, this is how we've doubled the overall survival every ten years in myeloma in the last 20 years by clinical trials. [Music]