The Southwest Oncology Group is an adult multi-disease, multi-modality clinical research organization with 33 Member Institutions, 23 Community Clinical Oncology Program (CCOP) institutions, including 5 Minority- Based CCOPs, 27 Urologic Cancer Outreach Program (UCOP) members, 22 High Priority program members and a network of 1,441 Cooperative Group Outreach Program (CGOP) investigators at 272 affiliate hospitals, and 15 institutions participating in the CTEP Minority program. Special emphasis areas for the Group with respect to the inclusion of women and minorities have come under the responsibility of the new Committee on Women and Special Populations. This group will focus on detailed analyses of women in the various disease categories. There have been gender differences identified in melanoma and lung cancer trials. The special populations include a commitment to optimize the enrollment of minorities in Group trials. Analyses of race and ethnicity impacts on the outcome of patients in our clinical trials are in progress. Additional special populations include the elderly patient advocates, and survivors of cancer. The Committee on Women and Special Populations portion of this application details the heavy current and future involvement of patient advocates in the committee activities of the Group. The Group will involve cancer survivors in our clinical trial committee structure. The Chairman of the Group has created an ethics training program which is delivered between 2-3 times to separate audiences, at every Group Meeting in order to help members understand the moral and ethical principles of the conduct of clinical trials. Tied to this, is the fully implemented Conflict of Interest Policy which identifies potential conflicts from all investigators, who then agree to recuse themselves from decision making related to their identified potential conflict(s) of interest. We have an Affirmation of Integrity statement on file for all members of the Group that come in contact with clinical trial data. The Group application includes correlative biologic studies from banked tumor specimens of homogeneously treated patients in breast, gastrointestinal, head and neck, leukemia, lymphoma, and multiple myeloma cancers. There are two new initiatives involved in this application. A proposal in lung cancer biology proposes a 2-year study of the molecular composition of lung cancer specimens obtained from patients on completed Group clinical trials. The second new initiative deals with a 5-year plan for upgrading Informatics at the Statistical Center and at Group institutions to become ready for all electronic data and information transfer into the future.
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