Patient Safety in Clinical Trials

Clinical trial participants are a vital part of cancer research and there are federal rules in place to help ensure the safety and ethics of clinical trials. Watch to learn more about how your safety is protected on clinical trials.

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Patient safety in clinical trials. The most important member of any clinical trial team is you, the patient. So important, that efforts to protect your safety begin even before the trial itself does. A clinical trial in the U.S. may only enroll patients after its protocol is approved by a group called an institutional review board, or IRB. IRB members include scientists as well as nurses, advocates and others. Their job is to monitor the clinical trials and protect participant safety. The protocol describes the study's goals and methods and outlines how the participant safety will be ensured. IRB members review the protocol to make sure that the risk of harms is as low as possible and that any potential harms are a reasonable part of the research study. Another important safety step is the informed consent process. Before you can join a trial, the