Read the Full Video Transcript

Martín Ángel: Hello, my name is Martín Ángel. I am a medical oncologist in the genitourinary tumor department of the Alexander Fleming Institute. I also take part in that same department, in the development and conduct of all of the clinical trials inside the institute, mostly focusing on genitourinary cancer trials. I don’t just believe, but rather I am convinced that clinical research is the cornerstone whereby patients can get the most out of the treatment they are receiving, at all times, at all stages of the disease.

And I believe we cannot move on and we cannot keep doing medicine if we do not conduct clinical research. So, I think we need to do more clinical trials in the institution and involve more patients in the research. Latin America is a great continent. It has many regions, many similarities, but it also has many differences in each of its populations, and that has to do with culture, race, and economics, issues that have resulted in us being totally different. And all of these populations are often not well represented in pivotal clinical trials that lead to the decisions being made for our patients today in oncology. Therefore, I believe that clinical research in our country and our region, should be promoted, or we should request more clinical trials with new drugs and new technologies that promote research in the field, primarily of genitourinary tumors.

The main barrier to what I have identified is a regulatory issue. Any delay that might come up or occur, that results in lost competition with other regulatory agencies around the world, such as the FDA or the EMA, where regulatory times for clinical trials are significantly delayed, and that either allows us or doesn’t allow us to enroll more patients into clinical trials. That is one of the main barriers that I have identified. But just as I have identified that barrier, there are also some favorable situations. What I thought was a barrier is also an opportunity for enrollment into clinical trials, that is the access to new drugs for economic reasons or for approval issues, where all of our region is having problems with access to new drugs, and that would promote entry to new technologies or newly available treatments. Even if you are not assigned to the experimental arm, they would have better access to the control arm, which would directly impact the survival of our patients. Today, more clinical trials are being conducted, but I think we should start as a Latin American group to generate our own designs of clinical studies, including our populations, to also get records that are ours, our own epidemiological information, to then be able to inform on therapeutic protocols.