Daniel Sargent on International Collaboration for Colon Cancer Research

Daniel Sargent, PhD, professor of Oncology and Biostatistics, Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, discusses the IDEA initiative, which is an international study to examine if patients with colon cancer would benefit from reducing the duration of adjuvant therapy from 3 months to 6 months to reduce side effects and cost.

To conduct the study, Sargent said that more than 10,000 patients had to be enrolled. Therefore, 6 different trials were conducted around the world, with a total of more than 12,000 patients. The results of the trial have not yet been released.

Sargent emphasized that international data sharing and collaboration is important, not only for trials that need to be very large, but also for studies dealing with rare subtypes, where any one country may not have enough patients willing to participate.

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