If you’ve ever used a medication to treat an illness, you have a clinical trial to thank for it.

As a physician involved in various clinical trials at Hoag Family Cancer Institute, I am witnessing a remarkable evolution in medicine. Myself and my colleagues are using immunotherapy to “reprogram” patients’ immune systems to fight cancer on their own. We are injecting chemotherapy directly into tumors to shrink cancer while minimizing risk to a patient’s healthy tissue, and we are using state-of-the-art genomic testing of tumors to develop more targeted and effective treatments.