Apps are promising to match cancer patients to clinical trials. An ethicist digs into what could go wrong

If you talk to cancer researchers about barriers to scientific progress, you’ll probably hear this statistic: Only about 8% of people with cancer actually take part in clinical trials.

This being 2019, a lot of people think the problem can be solved with mobile apps that connect patients to the trials that might be right for them. But — this being 2019 — the use of such technology raises some thorny questions about privacy, consent, and conflict of interest.

Stephanie Morain is a medical ethicist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. She just co-authored a paper, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, digging into the ethical issues that arise when you take something as complicated as clinical trial recruitment and put it on a phone. Morain recently chatted with STAT about what she found.

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