Expert Care Combined with Innovative Research

Yale is one of the country's leading academic medical centers, providing state-of-the-art expert care for our patients. Through our innovative research programs, we constantly seek new and better ways of treating disease. But in order to develop new drugs, surgical techniques and other treatments, we need your help.

Discovering new medicines is a long and complicated process that begins in the laboratory and ends in your medicine cabinet. Without clinical trials to test the safety and effectiveness of new drugs, they would not be available to patients like you. Your participation is the engine that fuels clinical research, and that research is why millions of people are healthy and living longer than ever before.

Every day I see patients in my practice who are helped by medications that were tested in clinical trials. For some of them, I am able to offer an opportunity to try experimental treatments that are currently being tested and would not otherwise be available. Along with other doctors and nurses at Yale, I am working to make sure that our research discoveries lead to top quality medical care that is available to everyone.

If you're like most people, you would consider getting involved in a clinical research study if you had the chance. Yet only 2 % of the population in the United States participates in clinical trials. Among those suffering from severe, chronic illnesses, only 6% participate. As a result, an increasing number of clinical trials are delayed because they don't have enough volunteers.

Luckily, you do have the chance to participate in clinical research. And you have the opportunity to do so at an institution that also provides world class medical care. I hope you'll join the many patients before you who have played such an important role in advancing the medical care that benefits all of us.

David Leffell, MD
Professor of Dermatology and Surgery;
Section Chief, Dermatologic Surgery and Cutaneous Oncology