The present application demonstrates our new efforts emphasize disease sites beyond melanoma, where institutional expertise and minority patient accrual is feasible. The Head and Neck Cancer Program, Thoracic Oncology Program, and Gl Cancer Program have been major foci of our efforts in ECOG over the past several years, and we have succeeded to increase our accrual in these disease areas, to reapportion institutional activity. In these disease areas where we have demonstrated significantly greater accrual over the past 3 years, there is a greater opportunity to achieve improved levels of minority accrual, and these Disease Program efforts are coupled with several new and more rewarding initiatives in relation to minority outreach, that are described below and in the following competitive renewal application. These broader disease related efforts over the past several years have included recruitment of several leading investigators to the Head and Neck Cancer Program (A Argiris) and Hematologic Malignancies Program (P. Chaudhary, M. Mapara, M. Boyziadis), as well as the realignment of the Breast Program toward ECOG, with the appointment of A. Brufsky as Breast Program Director, which will increase and strengthen the effort to bring leading clinical investigations of the ECOG to the underserved minority African American populations of Pittsburgh and the surrounding areas of Western PA. ?
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