Johns Hopkins University NCTN Lead Academic Site Program

Project Summary/Abstract Johns Hopkins has been an academic member institution of cooperative groups since the founding of this national oncology research initiative. Over the decades, our faculty have provided strong clinical and laboratory scientific leadership, and administrative leadership to the cooperative groups. Our primary goal is to provide scientific leadership thus bringing innovative translational science developed in pre-clinical and early phase trials at Johns Hopkins via mechanisms such as the ETCTN to the National Clinical Trials Network (NCTN) for further development. Our faculty serve in leadership roles as study PIs and laboratory PIs, disease and modality committee chairs. The majority of our contributions and our longest association remains with ECOG-ACRIN and secondly with NRG. In the upcoming extension, we plan to continue activities in support of our aims: 1) To provide scientific leadership within the NCTN groups and their disease-oriented committees. 2) To bring correlative translational research, novel imaging and radiation techniques, cell biology and molecular biology, into clinical trials for all stages of cancer. 3) To strengthen and enhance the coordinated, collaborative, and inclusive infrastructure established under one administrative program in order to support NCTN projects and promote participation in order NCI-supported projects, such as the ETCTN. 4) To address the challenges of supporting participation and accrual across disciplines, modalities, rare and diverse patient populations at all Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center locations. 5) To promote the involvement of junior faculty in all our aims for their advancement and contribution to the NCI cancer program. These goals will be accomplished through the mission of the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center. Johns Hopkins investigators also focus on enhancing minority participation in clinical trials through grants as well as increasing overall clinical trial accrual throughout Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center sites. We anticipate uninterrupted continuity of our level of contribution to the NCTN in the upcoming year of extension.