UF Named Data Center As Four National Pediatric Cancer Groups Merge

August 31, 2000

GAINESVILLE, Fla.—In the race for the control – and even cure of – childhood cancer, researchers recognize there’s strength in numbers.

During the past 25 years, many of the major treatment breakthroughs have arisen out of the collaborative efforts of research groups across the continent. Now, in the ongoing quest to accelerate those discoveries, clinicians will turn to the University of Florida to help them evaluate the therapies they are testing in their young patients.

UF has been named the statistical center for the newly created international Children’s Oncology Group, a federally supported consortium that pools resources to design, conduct and analyze studies of pediatric cancer therapies worldwide. Clinicians throughout the United States, Canada, Switzerland, Australia, Israel and parts of Europe already have begun funneling their data to UF experts, who will analyze findings and monitor research initiatives.

Four groups have united to form the new National Cancer Institute-sponsored organization, now the largest pediatric cancer cooperative group in existence: the Pediatric Oncology Group, the Children’s Cancer Group, the National Wilms Tumor Study Group and the Intergroup Rhabdomyosarcoma Study Group.

Together these groups consist of approximately 260 hospitals, cancer centers and academic medical centers dedicated to curing and preventing childhood and adolescent cancer. They oversee dozens of research protocols for childhood cancer, which represent one in six entries onto the NCI-approved clinical trials currently conducted in the United States.

UF officials say the merger, which was official in April, will help produce faster research results and hasten the discovery of cures for children and adolescents with cancer. The development comes at a time when nearly three out of four children who develop cancer are eventually cured. Accordingly, research efforts have been broadened to look at the long-term effects of cancer therapy and how it affects the lives of childhood cancer survivors.

“We anticipate a much greater and focused effort, by all pediatric cancer investigators in the country, on the same problems at the same time,” said Dr. Paulette Mehta, medical director of pediatric hematology oncology and bone marrow transplantation at UF’s College of Medicine. “This concentrated effort should enable us to make progress at a much greater rate than previously imaginable and will certainly help us to make huge strides toward eradicating childhood cancer in our time.”

The Children’s Oncology Group Research Data Center at the UF/Shands Cancer Center will help design research protocols and aid in the development of research questions. UF officials also will monitor the performance of member institutions and conduct statistical analyses as data are gathered. On average, 100 clinical trials are under way on any given day, covering all major childhood malignancies, including leukemia, brain tumors and bone tumors, according to Brad Pollock, associate professor, interim chair of the College of Medicine’s department of health policy and epidemiology at UF, and associate director for cancer control at the UF/Shands Cancer Center. Pollock also has been appointed to the medical scientific advisory board for the National Childhood Cancer Federation, the foundation that sponsors the new group.

The Children’s Oncology Group consists of pediatric oncologists, surgeons, pathologists, psychologists, radiation oncologists, nurses, pharmacists, and clinical research associates who pool clinical case material and laboratory resources, and serve on numerous disease, discipline and scientific support committees.

“This puts us on the map in terms of being the major institute for pediatric cancer research,” Pollock said. “Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Yale, USC, Stanford…every major medical center with a childhood cancer research program belongs to this consortium. Collectively, about 65 percent of all children with cancer get placed on one of these treatment protocols. This is the standard of care for childhood cancer.”

UF currently receives more than $2 million a year in NCI funding for its pediatric cancer research programs. Approximately $1.5 million of that supports direct costs of the Research Data Center, headed by Jonathan Shuster. Another half million is earmarked for research on pediatric cancer prevention and control; Pollock is the principal investigator of that funding. The NCI also has awarded half a million a year in supplementary support for the past two years to aid the university as it goes through the merger.

The COG research data center, part of the department of statistics in UF’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, will serve as the repository for the research data submitted by member institutions and by centralized laboratories and tumor banks that analyze cancer specimens. Center officials also will monitor how many patients enroll in various studies and whether the research protocols are followed “to the letter of the law,” Pollock said. They will track timeliness of data submission and police quality of the institutions’ involvement in the studies. They will leave no detail unturned, analyzing whether appropriate laboratory tests have been done, how drugs were administered and monitored, and how various malignancies were categorized based on pathological data.

To aid in these efforts, UF has developed a new Web-based system that researchers use for remote data entry. UF has been a member of the Pediatric Oncology Group since it was formed in 1980 and has been the statistical center for that organization as well. The merger reduces the number of NCI-supported cooperative research groups from 12 to nine; the others are dedicated to the treatment of adult cancers.

The cooperative approach has been scientifically proven to increase survival rates in all forms of leukemia, lymphomas and solid tumors. In addition, the research has helped practitioners identify improvements in the treatment of childhood cancers, and contributed to a better understanding of cancer cause and development.

“The first cancer cooperative group goes back to the mid-1950s,” Pollock said. “It really is a long tradition.”