SOUTHWEST ONCOLOGY GROUP - OPERATIONS OFFICE

University Of Michigan At Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Linked publications, trials & patents

Abstract

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The Southwest Oncology Group is an adult, multi-disease, multi-modality clinical cancer research organization with 35 Member Institutions, 29 Community Clinical Oncology Program (CCOP) institutions, including 7 Minority-Based CCOPs, 27 Urologic Cancer Outreach Program (UCOP) members, and a network of 1,036 Affiliate Program investigators at 189 offices and hospitals, and 12 institutions participating in the CTEP Minority program. A special emphasis of the Group is managed by the renamed Committee on Special Populations, established in 1992. The committee's research and education agenda has broadened to include: women (or men), older cancer patients, cancer survivors, and racial/ethnic minority groups (African-American, Hispanic Americans and Asian American Pacific Islanders). Involving patient advocates in Group activities is an important role of this committee. The committee report details the cross-committee research and publications. The moral and ethical conduct of clinical research by the group members is emphasized by ethics training, the conflict of interest policy, affirmation of integrity and data and safety monitoring. In addition to the presentation of correlative sciences activities tied to tumor banks related to disease committees, we propose a Correlative Sciences Committee, which will provide oversight of science and quality assurance of assay technology across the six disease committee correlative science programs in the Group. There are three new initiatives in this application. Two new adult medical oncology Intergroup proposals, one dealing with advanced gynecologic cancer, the U.S. Gynecology Intergroup, and the second dealing with sarcomas, The U.S./Canada Sarcoma Intergroup. The third is the Early Therapeutics Committee, which will take advantage of the 10 institutions in the Group who hold Phase I NCI funded U-01s. This will be possible with the new Web-Based, Multi-User Phase I Monitoring System implemented by our Statistical Center.