Researchers at Fred Hutch Cancer Center identified a substantial increase over the past decade in the proportion of patients with cancer in the U.S. who participate in pharmaceutical industry sponsored clinical trials compared to those conducted with federal government support.
Published in The Journal of Clinical Oncology and presented at the ASCO Quality Care Symposium, these findings reveal trends of underinvestment in federally funded studies, flat enrollment counts in federally funded studies over more than a decade and a growing reliance on industry to conduct cancer research. The study showed that between 2018 and 2022, industry sponsored trials enrolled over eight times more patients than federally sponsored trials. For adult trials, industry enrolled nearly 10 times more patients.
These ratios have also grown substantially over time. Compared to a decade earlier (2008-2012), the proportion of enrollments attributable to industry vs. federal support increased from 4.
8 to 9.6 in adults, and from 0.7 to 2.
3 in children. The study was conducted in more than 26,000 cancer clinical studies in adults and children using data from clinicaltrials.gov.
The magnitude of difference revealed by the study, which was the first to comprehensively evaluate the comparative roles of industry and federal sponsors in supporting patient enrollments to cancer studies, took the researchers by surprise. We recognized that industry was playing an increasing role in cancer clinical research com.