Participate in a Study
When your child comes to Seattle Cancer Care Alliance for a transplant, he or she will be a patient in a research center.
What this means is that some of the doctors, nurses, and support staff who care for your child are in training (as fellows, for example), learning bone-marrow and stem cell transplant therapy. They always work under the close supervision of senior, experienced staff members.
All of our transplant patients, both adults and children, are treated in clinical trials, which are research studies seeking to improve results for transplant patients, including improved disease-free survival and better quality of life during and after their transplants. Most of our young patients will take part in several clinical trials.
“There are trials that look at infection, or graft-vs.-host disease, or the transplant itself,” says Dr. Jean Sanders, who heads the pediatric bone marrow transplant program at SCCA. “This is how we learn and improve our results.”
When you choose to have your child treated at SCCA, your child benefits from the knowledge gained from research studies in which former patients participated. In the same way, the studies your child participates in will benefit other children in the future.
Patient confidentiality is always protected in research studies. Your child will not be identified by name or initials in any research.
Informed Consent
You will be asked to sign a written consent form for each study in which your child participates. Your signature means that the study has been explained to you, that you understand the risks, that you have had a chance to ask questions, and that you freely agree to your child’s participation.
Long-Term Participation
We will continue to follow your child after his or her transplant. Our Long-Term Follow-Up program allows us to help individual patients with the health issues they may have post-transplant and also to collect data that is useful to our research goal of improving transplant therapy.
Questions About Research
Feel free to ask your child’s doctor or nurse if you have any questions or concerns about your child’s participation in research studies.
Read:
Children & Clinical Trials
Advice to Parents