Health & Fitness
Everything You Need to Know About Clinical Trials
Banner Research's carefully conducted clinical trials can help lead to new diagnoses, treatments and prevention methods.
Research isn't just conducted by scientists in a lab. With clinical trials at Banner Research, patients participate hands-on in the latest medical innovation. Carefully conducted clinical trials are the fastest and safest way to find treatments and to improve health.
Banner Research leads the way in conducting research ethically, safely and efficiently so that patients are protected throughout every stage of the clinical trials process. If you're considering participating in a clinical trial with Banner Research, here's what you should know.
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Clinical trials will continue to lead to new and better treatments for disease.
Participating in research studies and clinical trials can help lead to new diagnoses, treatments and prevention methods for diseases such as Parkinson's, fibromyalgia, arthritis, cancer, cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer's.
Joining a study helps advance research, but it can also give participants access to treatments and therapies not currently available to the general public. This is particularly important to people for whom established therapies have not been effective.
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Clinical trials are evaluated for safety.
Research conducted at any Banner facility — including the Banner Alzheimer's Institute — is overseen by the Institutional Review Board (IRB). The IRB serves as an ethics committee that ensures the rights and safety of clinical trial participants are protected in accordance with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations.
Clinical studies require patients to sign an informed consent form.
Before agreeing to participate in any clinical trial, a patient will need to sign an informed consent form. Per Clinicaltrials.gov, this is when researchers provide all the important information about the study so potential participants can decide whether to enroll (or if already enrolled, if they wish to continue participating).
Potential patients are made aware of the risks and potential benefits of participating in a study. The informed consent process stresses that enrolling in (and staying in) a clinical study is completely voluntary. As Clinicaltrials.gov notes, giving consent to participate in research is not a contract, so patients can leave a study at any time.
Banner Health and University of Arizona's All of Us Research Program offers a different approach to clinical research.
In most cases, research studies are sponsored by the federal government through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a pharmaceutical company or both. The researchers, physicians and other health care professionals who run the research study are known as "trial investigators," and they're chosen for their medical expertise in a specific therapeutic area.
Offering a different approach to research, Banner Health and the University of Arizona Health Sciences are partners in the All of Us Research Program from the NIH. The All of Us Research Program is not a clinical research trial focused on a specific disease or population. Instead, it will serve as a national research resource to inform thousands of studies, covering a wide variety of health conditions that affect many different people.
The All of Us Research Program has made strong progress in its efforts to advance precision medicine.
Creating the right health care for the right person is called precision medicine. This is the goal of the All of Us Research Program from the NIH. According to program leadership in a forthcoming paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, the All of Us Research Program has made strong progress in its efforts to advance precision medicine.
The program aims to include data from 1 million or more people from diverse communities. As of July 2019, more than 230,000 people have enrolled, including 175,000 participants who have completed the core protocol. Of those, 80 percent are from groups that have been historically underrepresented in biomedical research.
Participants will have opportunities over the course of several years to provide additional data about themselves that will help researchers learn more about how individual differences in lifestyle, environment and biological makeup can influence health and disease. In the future, this data will be broadly accessible to approved researchers, and participants will receive information back about themselves.