The main goal of the Pediatric Preclinical Testing Consortium (PPTC) is to develop models that will translate to human clinical practice and effectively prioritize therapies for the treatment of pediatric cancers. An effective Coordinating Center (CC) will be critical to the Consortium?s goals by providing broad organizational, scientific, and analytic expertise to support NCI scientists and the PPTC Research Programs. The CC will also be responsible for developing, implementing, and evaluating a comprehensive PPTC research program, providing leadership in data collection and ongoing program evaluation to ensure that the research program is making optimal progress toward the PPTC mission. Providing the organizational and administrative leadership necessary to enable the Consortium to function efficiently will also be a key function of the CC. RTI?s goal as the proposed CC for the PPTC will be to optimize Consortium progress in generating reliable data to accelerate the development of more effective treatments for children with cancer by achieving the following specific aims: 1. Guide interactions between Consortium members and the pediatric oncology community. Provide the logistical support necessary to run an efficient and productive Consortium through effective teleconferences, webinars, Consortium meetings, and website. Employ these tools to facilitate interactions between PPTC members, pharmaceutical companies, and pediatric oncology advocacy organizations to ensure that promising new therapies are utilized efficiently. 2. Generate reliable predictive data that can be used for prioritization of therapeutic agents in pediatric cancer. Provide efficient and robust procedures for data collection, and statistical analysis of data collected from the Research Programs. 3. Provide the Consortium with a comprehensive, yet flexible set of scientific, statistical, and analytic resources needed to develop an innovative research program for creating a functional Consortium for pediatric preclinical testing. Develop tools to track the status of each potential drug candidate through the preclinical process. Document variables in a Consortium-side data dictionary as one element to build the data management system in REDCap.
In the field of pediatric oncology, preclinical testing is crucial not only for leveraging successes in adult cancers to pediatric cancers, but also for identifying promising targets for novel agents; however, preclinical data to support clinical development in pediatric clinical trials have lagged compared with the development of cancer drugs for adults. The Preclinical Pediatric Testing Consortium (PPTC) will continue to leverage pediatric preclinical models to identify mechanisms and molecular targets to assess the relevance of drugs for pediatric cancers. As the Coordinating Center for the PPTC, RTI will continue to strengthen the interactive collaboration for all stakeholders, manage data management and stewardship activities, and streamline resources and output data processes to maximize the research investment in pediatric oncology.
