Clinical Trials Information for Patients General Description What is a clinical trial? In cancer research, a clinical trial is an organized study conducted in people with cancer to answer specific questions about a new treatment or a new way of using a known treatment. Each study tries to increase medical knowledge and to find new and better ways to help cancer patients. Besides studying new anticancer drugs, clinical trials study new combinations of drugs already …showed first 75 words of 1254 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1254 total…large bowel cancer. The standard therapy for large bowel cancer is surgery. An adjuvant study could be run in which one group of patients with large bowel cancer received surgery and the other group received surgery and then chemotherapy. If the study shows that surgery plus chemotherapy is better than surgery alone, surgery plus chemotherapy will become the new, standard therapy. Adjuvant studies progress through phase I, II, and III trials like other treatment studies.