The major objective of the Childrens Cancer Group (CCG) in Pittsburgh is to improve the outcome for children with cancer. This objective is achieved by: 1. Providing children with cancer the opportunity to benefit from participation in CCG protocols. 2. Providing patients for CCG research protocols. 3. Providing biologic specimens from patients for these research protocols. 4. Providing accurate patient data for analysis of results. 5. Providing skilled medical professionals to plan, conduct, and evaluate the studies. 6. Developing and testing new ideas with local research projects. 7. Administering and conducting these studies efficiently at the lowest cost. This research is conducted at the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh (CHP), a 235 bed not for profit hospital which is the pediatric referral center for a population of 4 to 5 million people. CHP is associated with the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and serves as its Department of Pediatrics. CHP is also a full member of the Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, an NIH designated comprehensive cancer center and has been a member of CCG since 1961. During the Past year, a completely renovated, dedicated oncology ward and a new CCG approved bone marrow transplant (BMT) program have been opened to improve our ability to conduct research. Our multi-disciplinary pediatric oncology/BMT team has expanded to 10 oncologists and includes surgeons (including neuro and orthopedic), radiation oncologists, diagnostic radiologists, pediatric pathologists, a hematopathologist, cytogeneticists, a neurologist, epidemiologists, cardiologists, psychologists, and a complete support team (nursing, data managers, social service, a specimen coordinator, etc.). With the opening of the new CHP Rangos Research Building and the establishment of three new faculty members with independent funding, we have increased our laboratory research and anticipate an increase in basic research contributions to CCG. With a larger number of investigators, we also anticipate maximum participation in CCG. We expect to increase patient enrollment in therapeutic, biologic, and epidemiologic studies. There were 139 patients entered on study during 1992 (therapeutic, special, and epidemiologic) and we anticipate even a higher on-study number m the coming years since we have been approved as a phase I and BMT center in the past year. We are also planning to take a larger scientific and administrative role in CCG with the recent expansion in our staff. In addition, we have local independent cancer research projects in progress that we hope will benefit our patients and CCG. These non-CCG clinical and laboratory cancer projects include but are not limited to: The proliferative response of acute leukemia cells to recombinant growth factor; neuroblastoma treatment with deferoxamine; delineating mechanisms of signal transduction mediated via GM-CSF on CD4; the study of signal transduction by proto-oncogenes including the anti-proliferative effects of anti-sense molecules.
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