Eligibility criteria

The list of who can and cannot join a trial, set for safety and clear results; not qualifying says nothing about you as a person.

Eligibility criteria are the trial’s rules for who can join and who can’t. They come in two parts: inclusion criteria (things you need to have, like a certain cancer type or biomarker) and exclusion criteria (things that would rule you out for now, like another health condition that could make the treatment unsafe).

These rules exist for two good reasons: to keep participants safe, and to keep the results clear enough to trust. They’re spelled out in the trial’s protocol. One thing to hold onto: if you don’t qualify for a particular trial, it says nothing about you — it’s just a matter of fit, and there are often other trials with different criteria.