Community Cancer Centers Pilot Underway

SAIC-Frederick is managing a three-year pilot program designed to give more patients greater access to the latest advances in cancer care and treatment without having to leave their home communities.

The pilot will test the concept for an NCI Community Cancer Centers Program (NCCCP), which would extend the benefits of leading-edge research and clinical programs to a greater number of patients across the country without their having to commute to major cancer centers.

The community-based program would complement and expand upon the existing NCI Cancer Centers Program, which supports 63 major academic and research institutions nationwide that conduct broad-based, interdisciplinary cancer research.

These centers give patients access to the latest research advances and a gateway to NCI-sponsored clinical trials. But they only serve 15 percent of Americans diagnosed with cancer. The remaining 85 percent of patients-including senior citizens and underrepresented and disadvantaged populations-receive care in their home communities in private-practice oncology settings.

It is into these community settings that the NCI wants to bring the latest scientific advances and the highest level of innovative, multi-specialty care. There is also a growing need for additional patients to enroll in early-stage clinical trials so promising medications can be tested for safety and effectiveness without delay. The pilot will reach out to these potential participants.

The pilot seeks to:

• Draw more patients into clinical trials. Patients will have access to the latest cancer prevention and treatment advances through NCI-sponsored clinical trials. Pilot sites will provide a local point of entry to draw more patients into clinical trials and enable researchers to more rapidly develop and evaluate effective prevention and treatment strategies.

• Reduce cancer healthcare disparities. A major focus of the NCCCP is to help reduce the cancer burden among underserved populations. The NCCCP will actively reach out to these communities, bringing more Americans into the system of care and helping NCI to better understand and address the underlying causes of cancer health disparities.

• Prepare sites for standardizing the collection and storage of voluntarily donated biological specimens for cancer research. With access to a broader cross-section of patients who voluntarily provide tissue and blood samples, researchers will have a greater opportunity to study both normal and cancerous cells. The pilot will assess how NCI's guidelines for collection and storage of specimens can be applied nationwide to accelerate the development of new treatments for patients.

• Link sites to national computer networks that support basic, clinical, and population-based cancer research. The pilot will assess the ability of sites to link medical information, provided with patient consent, to NCI's electronic patient data network, Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid™ (caBIG™). Expanding the amount of patient data available to cancer researchers will greatly contribute to our knowledge and treatment of cancer.