She serves as the assistant director of Education Programs at the Association of Cancer Care Centers and works as a PRN Heart Transplant nurse at MedStar Washington Hospital Center, located in Washington, DC.

Kimberly Demirhan

Clinical trials should be designed to ease travel and financial burdens by using local care, telehealth and remote tools, Kimberly Demirhan explained.

Making Cancer Clinical Trials More Accessible in Local Communities

Kimberly (Cary) Demirhan, a registered nurse and assistant director of Education Programs at the Association of Cancer Care Centers, emphasized the importance of making clinical trials more accessible for patients receiving care in their own communities.

She explained that this involves reducing the need for travel to large academic centers by supporting local research sites with infrastructure, education and mentorship. Demirhan also highlighted the need to rethink trial design — such as incorporating telehealth, local lab draws and remote monitoring tools — to ease the logistical and financial burden on patients. She also works as a PRN heart transplant nurse at MedStar Washington Hospital Center in Washington, DC.

How can researchers work to make trials more accessible to patients receiving care in their own communities?

We want to make sure that trials are as accessible as possible, and that means not necessarily having to go to large academic centers to get treatment or to be enrolled in trials, but to access them where you live — without the logistical or financial barriers that can come with needing to travel for a trial.

As an organization, we focus on the professional capacity side of that — looking at how to build up community research sites to be able to do clinical trials. We work on preparing them to build their infrastructure and providing them with the education, resources and mentorship they need to be able to do research in the community.

Really, the goal of our organization is to make trials accessible for community-based patients, so they’re not having to leave their home or travel long distances. And rethinking the clinical trial structure — how we actually deliver trials — is really important in this conversation. That includes assessing how frequently patients actually need to be seen in person, what care can be delivered through telehealth, whether they can get their labs done through local lab draws, or if they can wear digital tools or patient monitoring devices — so they’re not having to travel long distances just to enroll or stay in a trial.

“Bringing Cancer Research to the Community: Strategic Approaches to Representative Oncology Clinical Trial Design,” by Dr. Nicole A Colwell, et al. ACCC Community Oncology Research Institute.

Transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness

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There is an urgent need for more inclusive and community-focused cancer clinical trials, according to Kimberly (Cary) Demirhan.

A Call to Action for More Inclusive Clinical Trials in Cancer Care

There is an urgent need for more inclusive and community-focused cancer clinical trials, according to Kimberly (Cary) Demirhan, a registered nurse, who said that traditional trials often exclude patients from underrepresented populations.

The exclusion of these patients can range from racial and ethnic minorities and older adults to rural residents. Demirhan explored this unmet need further in research published by the Association of Cancer Care Centers (ACCC) to explore strategies that broaden access.

To delve deeper into this topic, Demirhan sat down for an interview with CURE in which she discusses the importance of including real-world patients in clinical trials, including those with other health conditions, who are older, or live in rural areas.

A major goal of your work is to ensure that trials reflect real-world patients. What does that mean for patients who may have other health conditions, be older, or live in rural areas?

Our goal in the work we're doing is to ensure that trials are accessible to everyone. The importance of this is that we want to make sure the patients we are using these trial drugs on represent all different walks of life. They should be of various ethnicities and genders, and exposed to different external environmental factors, and so on. It's really important to us that while historically, trials have had a high rate of enrollment with older white males, not every disease state affects only older white males.

So, we want to ensure that when we look at who's enrolling in trials, we broaden that scope so that people of different ethnicities and genders are all enrolled. This way, when we are looking at the safety and efficacy of these trial drugs, they are applicable to everyone who is potentially going to experience this disease type or cancer, and that those drugs are safe for everyone. It's really important that we expand our access to have a wide variety of patients enrolling in trials, to reflect the patients who are actually dealing with the disease and who are actually going to be taking that medication in the real world down the line, and to make sure that it is safe for everyone.

Kimberly Demirhan

Making Cancer Clinical Trials More Accessible in Local Communities

A Call to Action for More Inclusive Clinical Trials in Cancer Care

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