Establishing trust in the health care system and in a patient’s care team can significantly influence decisions about enrolling in a clinical trial, particularly for those patients already facing the uncertainty inherent in a cancer diagnosis. As clinical research offers access to innovative therapies, trust becomes essential in helping patients feel confident that their team is guiding them toward the right trial at the right time. A CANCER BUZZ podcast episode from September 2025 offers a powerful window into the patient experience of navigating clinical trial enrollment through the voices of poet and patient with multiple myeloma Glenis Redmond, clinical research coordinator Audrianna Carrington, MS, CCRP, and oncologist/hematologist Tondre Buck, MD, of Gibbs Cancer Center and Research Institute in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
Participation in clinical trials provides patients with access to innovative therapies while advancing the science that informs future standards of care. Despite their importance, clinical trials remain underused by many populations, particularly individuals from historically underserved communities. To address these disparities, the American Cancer Society (ACS) has launched a nationwide expansion of ACS Access to Clinical Trials and Support (ACTS), a comprehensive program designed to increase equitable access to cancer clinical trials across the United States.
Clinical research depends on a robust and well-trained research workforce; however, this professional group has long faced challenges related to role definition and access to formal training. As a result, nearly 95% of cancer centers have reported staffing challenges in a time when clinical trials are more complex and abundant than ever. According to a 2022 report, clinical research professionals (CRPs) with 5–10 years of experience were resigning at rates 60% higher than in 2020. Turnover among patient-facing CRPs has climbed to 35%–61%, while demand continues to outpace supply, with vacancies estimated at 7 to 35 times the number of available jobseekers.
In a recent survey, 80% of oncologists reported feeling overwhelmed by the amount of new information to keep up with, including new research and clinical trials. As a result, an emerging trend in clinical research has been the development of tools and resources to consolidate new information for providers and facilitate implementation of clinical research. One such tool is Lilly's Clinical Trial Finder platform, which allows providers to quickly search for active phase 3 clinical trials for which their patients may be eligible. Lilly's Trial Library is powered by the original Trial Library, which we initially reviewed in a 2023 newsletter.
Adolescents and young adults (AYAs), defined as individuals between 15 and 39 years at the time of cancer diagnosis, make up only about 4.2% of patients newly diagnosed with cancer in the US, according to the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Because this population represents a relatively small proportion of patients nationally, clinical trial researchers often struggle to identify large and diverse cohorts of AYAs at a single site, even within major academic cancer centers. To address this challenge, some AYA investigators are increasingly partnering with community cancer centers through national clinical trial research bases such as the ECOG-ACRIN Cancer Research Group and the NCI Community Oncology Research Program (NCORP). Although community cancer centers may be smaller individually, collectively, they provide care to approximately 85% of patients diagnosed with cancer in the US, creating access to a broad and diverse population of AYAs for clinical trial participation.
Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah serves 17% of the contiguous land mass of the US. Patients travel to Huntsman Cancer Institute from the 5-state Mountain West region including Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming. These patients make extraordinary sacrifices to access Huntsman Cancer Institute care, averaging a 4-hour drive or more, to receive their cancer care in Salt Lake City. Approximately 30% of patients participating in a Huntsman Cancer Institute clinical trial travel more than 150 miles each way and approximately 25% are from rural/frontier communities.