Below are some of the common types of cancer clinical trials

Treatment trials

Researchers run treatment trials in stages. These stages are called phases.

The early phases aim to find out more about the safety and side effects of a new treatments. Later phases aim to see if a new treatment works better than the current treatment. Or if a new treatment works better than a dummy drug (placebo Open a glossary item)

For trials that compare two or more treatments, you are put into a treatment group at random. This is a randomised trial. They are the best way to get reliable information about how well a new treatment works.

Multi-arm multi-stage (MAMS) trials

A multi arm trial is a trial that has: several treatment groups as well as the standard treatment group (the control group Open a glossary item)

Multi-arm multi-stage (MAMS) trials have the same control group all the way through. The other treatment groups can change as the trial goes on. As these trials are more complex there are a number of treatments that people might have.

The research team may decide to stop recruiting people to a particular group. This could be because they have enough people to start looking at the results. Or because early results show the treatment isn’t working as well as they’d hoped.

The researchers may add new treatment groups as new drugs become available to look at. This means they don’t have to design and launch a brand new trial each time they want to research a new treatment. So it helps get results quicker.

Cohort studies

A cohort is a group of people, so cohort studies look at groups of people. A cohort study follows the group over a period of time.

A research team may recruit people who do not have cancer and collect information about them for a number of years. The researchers see who in the group develops cancer and who doesn’t. They then look to see whether the people who developed cancer had anything in common.

Cohort studies are very useful ways of finding out more about risk factors. But they are expensive and time consuming. They can be used when it wouldn’t be possible to test a theory any other way.