CORE--CLINICAL INVESTIGATIONS SHARED RESOURCE

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Description: (Applicant's Description) The activities of the Clinical Investigations Shared Resource are centered around the Patient Referral Office. This resource is offered to member-investigators of the San Antonio Cancer Institute to support appropriate referral to and rapid completion of peer reviewed, funded clinical research projects and investigator-initiated pilot studies. The Patient Referral Office is the primary venue for patient access to cancer center clinical trials. The Patient Referral Coordinator accepts telephone inquiries from physicians, patients and others about the availability of clinical trials. Contacts by mail are also addressed through phone calls from this office. The Patient Referral Coordinator can assess preliminary patient eligibility by phone, assemble clinical data for review, and arrange an evaluation by a SACI physician-investigator. Since January 1, 1997, this office has accepted 1,255 telephone calls about access to clinical trials or cancer. These calls may be brief, single contacts or many initiate several hours or conversation and multiple follow-up calls between the coordinator and the referring oncologist, patient, protocol investigators and cancer center personnel. The Patient Referral Coordinator is equipped to provide callers with up- to-date eligibility and treatment about all therapeutic clinical research studies conducted at this cancer center, including all cooperative group studies, NCI Phase I Cooperative Agreement studies, investigator-initiated institutional pilot studies, and pharmaceutical company-sponsored studies conducted under the SACI Experimental Therapeutics Program, as well as the NSABP Breast Cancer Prevention Trial, the Intergroup Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial, and referrals for evaluation in the SACI Cancer Prevention and Risk Assessment Clinic related to studies conduced by the SACI Cancer Prevention and Health Promotion and Breast Cancer Programs. The Patient Referral Office has become an essential and central component of our cancer center's interactions with the community and with other cancer treatment facilities. The office provides an efficient mechanism for assuring the highest likelihood of matching a clinical trial with a patient's treatment needs. It is noteworthy that the Patient Referral Coordinator's special value to the clinical investigations programs of the SACI is her level of expertise in obtaining in-depth information from callers about their treatment needs, the caller's potential for participation in a SACI clinical trial, and developing realistic plans for the caller's further evaluation in our setting or that of another cancer center.