One Idea Worth Acting On.

A patient with stage-four lung cancer drives three hours to a clinical trial site.

The visit is for a five-minute blood draw.

He drops out the same day.

The industry calls it a recruitment problem.

The patient calls it impossible.

We call it a recruitment problem. But the real failure happened months earlier — in the design room.

Patient centricity has become oncology's most repeated commitment — and its most unexamined one. Organizations build advisory boards, add PRO instruments, and use "patient-centered" in every strategy deck.

But if patients are not in the room when the design decisions are made, that is not patient centricity. It is a label.

As Terri Conneran, patient advocate and contributor to Voices of Oncology, puts it: being the subject of the conversation is not the same as having a seat at the table. One means you are the dinner. The other means you helped plan the meal.

What's Actually Happening

Protocols are still being designed by teams whose calendars have nothing in common with someone managing stage-four cancer, a three-hour commute, and two children at home.

Visit schedules get reviewed for regulatory risk. Nobody reviews them for human feasibility.

When patient input is collected at all, it arrives late — a PRO instrument added after t he protocol locks, a survey distributed after enrollment begins. That is commentary. Not influence.

Why This Matters

Enrollment failure is the single most common reason oncology trials don't complete on time. Protocol burden — excessive visits, impractical monitoring requirements, the financial toll of travel — is one of the primary drivers.

This is not a motivation problem. Cancer patients are fighting for their lives. If they are dropping out, the protocol failed them — not the other way around.

Designing without patients produces trials that generate data about an idealized population that does not exist in the clinic. That gap is one of the most persistent reasons approved drugs underperform post-launch.

Where It Breaks in the Real World

Elizabeth Franklin, Head of US Public Affairs and Patient Advocacy at Sanofi and contributor to Voices of Oncology, describes a patient with stage-four lung cancer who drove three hours to a clinical trial site — only to discover the visit was for a blood draw. He dropped out the same day.

That schedule was reviewed by clinical, regulatory, IRB, and operational teams. Nobody asked the patient whether it was survivable.

The question was never asked because the patient was not in the room.

What Needs to Change

Patient inclusion at the design stage is not a virtue. It is the mechanism that prevents the enrollment failures and protocol amendments that cost the industry billions.

It means a patient present at protocol design — not consulted afterward. A visit schedule tested against the reality of serious illness before it locks. An eligibility criterion challenged by someone who knows what the real patient population actually looks like.

The organizations getting this right are not doing more work. They are doing earlier work.

The Bottom Line

Until patients have standing to challenge design decisions before they lock, the industry will keep building trials for patients who don't exist — and managing the dropout of the patients who do.

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