Coronovirus Pandemic Brings Hundreds Of U.S. Clinical Trials To A Halt
Rene Roach fired off a quick email in late March for an update on a colorectal cancer clinical trial for which she hoped to qualify.
Worried about the coronavirus, she asked, almost as an afterthought, whether the study had been put on hold because of the pandemic.The answer crushed her: It had been.
"That's when COVID-19 shut down everything," says Roach, 50, of Germantown, Md.
Roach assumed that there would be workarounds for patients like her, who have stage IV cancer. These patients often depend on clinical trials as their best chance to knock cancer out when other therapies have failed.
For now, she's being treated with traditional chemotherapy, but she was counting on the drug cocktail from the clinical trial. She figures if chemo was going to rid her body of cancer for good, it would have done so already.
"It's buying time. But how
