Georgia Regents University (GRU) has been home to Georgia's only NCI MB-CCOP since 2004. With its affiliate site, University Cancer & Blood Center (UCBC), GRU has enrolled nearly 800 patients to NCI clinical trials: 39% of them African American (AA) and other minorities, with accrual split between treatment trials (48%) and prevention and control trials (52%). Building on this successful track record, GRU Cancer Center (GRUCC) and UCBC are joining forces with Morehouse School of Medicine (MSM) and the Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health (JPHCOPH) at Georgia Southern University to become the NCORP Minority/Underserved Community Site for Georgia. The need to sustain and grow an NCORP that focuses on minority and underserved populations in Georgia is great. Georgia has some of the nation's worst cancer disparities, particularity between African Americans (AA) and Caucasians (CA) and between rural and urban populations. The disparities are glaring for some of the most common cancers. Not only do AA men in Georgia have the highest rate of prostate cancer among AA men in the country, they are almost twice as likely to be diagnosed with the disease as CA men in Georgia and three times as likely to die from it. In Georgia, AA women die of breast cancer 25% more often than CA women, and AA die of colorectal cancer 45% more than CA.
The Specific Aims of the proposed NCORP M/U site for Georgia are to: 1) Implement a NCORP M/U Site for Georgia that meets or exceeds all NCI requirements; 2) Contribute to the design, conduct and translation of the national NCORP research agenda, particularity studies that pertain to minority and underserved populations; and 3) expand patient and provider access to-and enrollment/participation in-cancer prevention, control, imaging, treatment and screening/post-surveillance clinical trials and cancer care delivery research throughout Georgia, particularly for minority and underserved populations in urban and rural settings. Key sub-aims include the implementation of a leadership development program to cultivate the next generation of NCORP investigators and leaders and engagement to key stakeholders and community partners in all aspects of the NCORP research agenda.
Georgia represents a unique opportunity to pursue research directed towards cancer disparities and to affect minority and underserved communities' accrual to clinical trials and cancer care delivery research studies. 30% of its 9.9M residents are AA (vs. 12% in the U.S.) and 75% of its counties are rural, most of them medically underserved. Georgia's NCORP M/U Site will ensure greater access to state-of-the-art cancer care across the state and broader translation of research findings into public health and clinical practice.
| Goldstein, Lori J; Zhao, Fengmin; Wang, Molin et al. (2017) A Phase I/II study of suberoylanilide hydroxamic acid (SAHA) in combination with trastuzumab (Herceptin) in patients with advanced metastatic and/or local chest wall recurrent HER2-amplified breast cancer: a trial of the ECOG-ACRIN Cancer Research Group ( Breast Cancer Res Treat 165:375-382 |
