We live in a golden age of progress in oncology, with newer, more personalised and more effective treatments emerging with remarkable speed. The randomised controlled trial has long been the building block of that progress. Yet, as our desire to bring new treatments from bench to bedside grows, the design, funding, and purpose of trials are changing in important ways.
The realities of funding availability—and the scarcity of grants to support independent, academic-led studies—have shaped the kinds of questions that can be asked. Alongside this, a growing use of putative surrogate endpoints, adaptive designs, and accelerated approval pathways has helped bring therapies to patients more quickly, but can also make it harder to interpret long-term outcomes and value, and can make communicating complex trial results to patients in the clinic ever more difficult.
This presentation explores how these trends are reshaping oncology research and how they have inspired the Common Sense Oncology movement, which seeks to rebalance collaboration across the sector. The goal is to ensure that research continues to serve patients first, re-focusing on patient outcomes that matter.