Would you offer to participate in medical research? What if you could know that by doing so, a new cancer treatment would become available? One thing is certain – new treatments must be tested on humans before they can become available to all who need them. So how do we test new treatments and what is involved in this type of medical research?

Clinical trials are the standard way of testing new treatments and involve a series of steps, each gathering more evidence on whether or not the treatment is safe and effective. But the road to the first step (a Phase One trial) is so tough it puts a gladiator obstacle course to shame.

Scientists and medical doctors team up to rigorously test any new treatment in the lab, often for many years, before they can apply for permission to run a clinical trial.

They need to be extremely confident, based on mountains of evidence, that the treatment is going to do good. At this point nurses, patients and clinical trials experts join the team to apply for approval to run the trial in humans.

Phase One trials are the first step out of the lab and tend to involve 10 to 30 people. They aim to check that the treatment is safe and to see whether the effects that the scientists expect actually happen. The first person tested will get the lowest dose that the lab results suggest could have some positive effect. The dose will be increased, bit by bit, until a dose is reached where there is maximum effect with minimum side effects. A Phase One trial takes one to two years. If good results are obtained in the Phase One trial, we can move on to Phase Two. Phase Two trials last a number of years and involve between 30 and 300 patients. This is the phase where it gets really interesting because we can find out how the treatment works in different people in much more detail. We can further test the best dose and check for any side effects.

Phase Three trials are big because at this stage we know it is safe and that there are some good results.

Hundreds, if not thousands of people participate. A Phase Three trial will take years to complete and will be looking for effects – both positive and negative that may only occur in rare cases.

It becomes a maths game here because the more people that participate the more likely we are to spot these unusual or rare effects.

A new medicine takes between 10 to 15 years to get from the lab into hospitals as mainstream medicines.

The biggest challenge is often getting enough people to volunteer to participate. Without sufficient volunteers a trial cannot gather strong enough evidence to proceed. Interestingly people who do participate in trials say that they feel better looked after with excellent care, facilities and comfort. There are lots of considerations for people interested in participating in clinical trials but just like organ donation it is something we rarely discuss that we probably should. Every person’s contribution makes a huge difference to our ability to improve health and medicine.