Donations at Work: Clinical Trails for Childhood Cancer

At Orlando Health Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children, clinical trials (as well as more traditional therapies) play an important role in the treatment of childhood cancer.

A clinical trial is a research study designed to test a specific medical treatment or intervention in people to determine whether it is safe and effective. Before a treatment for cancer or any other ailment can be approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and recommended for widespread use, it must undergo extensive testing. Often these approval processes take years and cost millions of dollars to complete. Furthermore, if there is a new drug that has been shown to help children with cancer, researchers will then study how the standard treatment compares to the new treatment to determine the most effective way to attack the disease.

Donations to Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals are unrestricted and support the areas of greatest need for our hospital, including funding groundbreaking research and clinical trails.

Why are clinical trials important?

Over the last 40 years, the number of deaths occurring in children from cancer has decreased by nearly 70 percent. This means that a diagnosis that was virtually a death sentence for a child one generation ago is now not only treatable, but usually curable. The effort put forth through clinical trials is largely responsible for this stunning accomplishment.

There is, however, still more that must be done. As it stands now, approximately 14,000 children in the United States will be diagnosed with cancer this year. And even with the advancements we’ve made in the past several decades, cancer is still the number one killer of children ages 0 to 14 from disease in this country.

We can do better, and we must!

We owe it to our kids and to future generations to do everything we can to eliminate this devastating disease, and clinical trials are one of the important ways we fight to do so. Offering clinical trials here at Arnold Palmer Hospital benefits patients in many ways.

Learn more about how clinical trials make a difference in the lives of kids with cancer on the Arnold Palmer Hospital Illuminate blog and in the short video below.