North Central Cancer Treatment Group (NCCTG) Biospecimen Resource

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The mission of the North Central Cancer Treatment Group (NCCTG) is to improve the duration and quality of life of cancer patients by performing high-quality clinical and translational research in the community setting. NCCTG was founded on the premise that cancer care in the U.S. occurs primarily in the community practice setting. Consequently, the community is the most appropriate venue for testing novel approaches to prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and symptomatic management of cancer. Since 2003, NCCTG has received more than 17,000 tumor tissue blocks from over 12,000 patients, and NCCTG has received over 38,000 body fluid biospecimens from more than 9,500 patients. Typically, specimens are received from 70 to 90% of patients from whom they are requested, and approximately 75% originate from community oncology sites. Consequently, specimens representative of the clinical trial participants are available in sufficient numbers to answer the scientific questions posed in the correlative laboratory studies. The NCCTG Biospecimen Resource will support the NCCTG mission by providing superior biospecimens from patients enrolled on NCCTG trials that 1) are fully and consistently annotated, 2) have been collected under optimized standard conditions, 3) have undergone quality assessment, and 4) are stored under controlled conditions allowing efficient retrieval for distribution to qualified researchers. The four specific aims of this application are: 1) to continue to optimize the collection and annotation of biospecimens obtained from patients enrolled on NCCTG and other cooperative group clinical trials; 2) to maintain standard operating procedures (SOPs) for collecting, processing and storing biospecimens; 3) to apply emerging technologies for collection and processing of biospecimens; and 4) to provide ongoing oversight to the resource and Improve marketing and education regarding access to the resource for the research community. NCCTG representatives will actively participate in Group Banking Committee (GBC) activities, will assume leadership roles within the GBC as appropriate, and will implement policies established by the GBC. NCCTG is committed to harmonization of GBC processes, including standard operating procedures, promotion of the resource, information systems, and development of new strategies during the proposed RELEVANCE: The NCCTG Biospecimen Resource provides large numbers of well-annotated biospecimens from patients enrolled in specified treatment protocols with definitive endpoints, thus, enabling research in markers diagnostic of a particular disease entity, prognostic of disease progression or predictive of response to treatment. Appropriate and efficient use of this resource is vital to promote the scientific mission of NCCTG, other cooperative groups, and the national research agenda for cancer prevention and treatment.