Oncologist Birgit Grünberger used a continuing education session at the annual congress of German-language haematology and oncology societies in Vienna to examine how well trial evidence travels into routine care, Deutsches Ärzteblatt reports. Her talk, part of a session on diversity-sensitive and inclusive studies described as an interdisciplinary look at the topic, presented what the outlet called the "view from the clinic" on that tension. The congress took place in Vienna, and the report was published on Monday, 2 November 2026.
The core of her argument, as the report frames it, is a gap between two populations. People treated in day-to-day oncology frequently carry other illnesses alongside their cancer, show reduced organ function, or tolerate treatment less well than the volunteers who enter studies. Those characteristics are common in practice but far less common in the cohorts on which many therapy decisions rest.
Why it matters
Clinical trials are the evidentiary backbone of cancer treatment. Guidelines, approval decisions and bedside choices all lean on them. If the people enrolled in those trials are systematically healthier or otherwise unlike the people who later receive the drugs, the strength of that evidence becomes a practical question rather than an abstract one.
Grünberger's session title points to a second concern: diversity. Who is included in research shapes what the results can say about everyone else. The Vienna talk treated inclusiveness not as a matter of representation alone but as a question of whether findings remain usable once they reach wards where patients rarely resemble a study protocol.
Deutsches Ärzteblatt's headline for the interview captures the clinician's position in her own words: she argued for moving away from an automatic no and back toward a reasoned decision made case by case. The report does not set out the specific eligibility criteria or patient groups she had in mind.
A familiar mismatch, raised from the clinic's side
The pattern Grünberger described is well known to practising physicians. Trial protocols typically set boundaries on age, organ function and accompanying disease, and those boundaries exist for safety reasons. The effect, however, is that the patients most likely to raise difficult questions in real treatment are often the ones least represented in the data available to answer them.
Her intervention places the emphasis on judgment at the point of care. Rather than treating a protocol's exclusion as final, the argument runs, clinicians should be able to reach a justified conclusion about an individual patient. The report presents this as her view of how clinical practice should approach the problem, not as a proposed change to trial rules.
The session was framed as interdisciplinary, suggesting the discussion extended beyond oncology alone. Deutsches Ärzteblatt's account does not detail the other contributions or any conclusions the panel reached.
What to watch
Whether the congress discussion feeds into wider debate over trial eligibility and the use of real-world evidence in oncology is the next thing to track. For now, the Vienna session stands as a clinician's reminder that the average patient in a study and the average patient in a clinic are not the same person.
