Estimating effects of pancreatic cancer treatments using registry data
Research type
Research Study
Full title
A comparison of the effectiveness of different treatment regimens for adjuvant and advanced/metastatic pancreatic cancer using English cancer registry data
IRAS ID
273905
Contact name
Nicholas Latimer
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Sheffield
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 11 months, 31 days
Research summary
Large amounts of data are collected on cancer patients in the NHS. However, so far, no attempts have been made to assess whether the data collected is sufficient for reliably comparing the effectiveness of different cancer treatments. Usually new cancer treatments are compared in clinical trials, but clinical trials have strict eligibility criteria – they are not very representative of the general population. It would be useful to know how effective different treatments are when given to a more general cancer population – in case the effectiveness is different to that seen in the clinical trial population.
In this study National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service (NCRAS) data will be used to replicate clinical trials that have already been done in patients with pancreatic cancer. The results from the registry-based analyses will then be compared to the results from the trial-based analyses. If the results are similar, this suggests that registry data may be sufficient for comparing the effectiveness of different cancer treatments. This is an important first step in showing whether registry data can be relied upon to compare the effectiveness of different cancer treatments. If it can, we can use registry data to compare the effectiveness of different treatments in real world populations – going beyond the highly selected patient groups usually included in clinical trials. If it is not possible to successfully replicate clinical trial results using the registry data this suggests that the registry data is not good enough, or that effectiveness is different in the real world compared to in trials. We will investigate this and if there are problems with the data we will identify areas where data collection needs to be improved in order for registry data to be most useful.
REC name
London - Bromley Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
20/LO/0057
Date of REC Opinion
19 Feb 2020
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion