RENTON, Wash. — No treatment or drug gets to market without a clinical trial.
Many of those trials don’t just happen in academic settings.
In the latest Healthier Together, KIRO 7′s Ranji Sinha got an inside look at one private center running trials and spoke to patients about how it helps them.
Elvado Davis is a diabetic and a clinical trial participant at Rainier Clinical Research Center. He sat down with KIRO 7 to discuss what that experience has been like.
The former Marine says he knows his body and what a career in service did to it. He even admitted that his body got a bit ‘beaten up.’
Davis says he heard an advertisement on the radio years ago, offering for people to join clinical trials and he considered it.
While he is diabetic, the first trial he signed up for dealt with low testosterone. He has spent years participating in trials and admits there’s a larger purpose in doing them.
“My quality of life is improved because someone before me had done a study,” he told KIRO 7.
Kenny Kramer is also a clinical trial participant at Rainier Clinical Research Center. He says one trial truly changed his life.
“About ten years ago, I was in a trial here with Afrezza, which is an inhaled insulin,” he said.
Kramer is living with diabetes and said that getting insulin that he can inhale helped him maintain an active lifestyle.
Both men may never have crossed paths without the trials at the research center, which is based in Renton.
Eric Hayashi is the President and CEO of Rainier Clinical Research Center. He says the independent research center serves a key purpose.
“Drugs don’t get out unless they go through doors like ours,” he said.
Hayashi mentioned that many people do not necessarily know about private firms that are running trials and said that has been an issue in getting people to sign up for them.
“That’s one of our challenges is to get more awareness knowing about trials,” he said.
Hayashi says Rainer is one of the largest independent firms in the country doing clinical trials. There are potentially hundreds of participants taking part in dozens of trials that are studied at labs in Renton and Seattle.
Dr. Frances Broyles is an endocrinologist who worked for decades with Swedish in the Seattle area. Now she is often a primary investigator running trials that often need more participants. She also says that setting up in this area gives them access to a diverse population that’s often needed for clinical trials.
“I feel like the ability to get the word out about research has been problematic for all of us who participate in it,” she told KIRO 7.
Both patients we spoke to said time and flexibility were huge benefits to participating in the trials. Dr. Broyles says there truly is a different level of care that can be offered to participants.
“You have five or ten minutes with your doctor, when you come into a research center you have a tremendous amount of time with a physician,” she told KIRO 7.
She stresses that many participants can get so much more time with researchers who can often coordinate with their care teams on care.
For some of the researchers, the mission in clinical trials is personal.
“I actually just lost my mother to Alzheimer’s two months ago and she had a really long disease process,” said Dr. Sheryl Marks.
Dr. Marks is working on a trial on the early signs of Alzheimer’s. Dr. Marks is an anesthesiologist who worked in surgical settings, often ‘behind the drape’ as she puts it. She also would have limited time with patients in those settings, and she says it’s rewarding to spend months, and even years with trial participants.
“That’s really different than being in clinical practice where it’s a very production time-sensitive phase of care,” she told KIRO 7.
According to the National Library of Medicine, the number of private-sector nonacademic physicians running trials increased from 4,000 in 1990 to 20,250 in 2010.
The CEO of Rainier Clinical Research Center said those numbers have only increased in the last 15 years, and in the last five years he believes a major shift has occurred with more private and/or independent firms doing clinical trials.
Trial participants told KIRO 7 that success in one trial and exposure to others kept them coming back for other trials related to their conditions.
Davis hopes others join in to help advance medicine.
“This is my way of giving back and helping out,” Davis said.
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