Grant: Planning Grants - Priority Announcement: Cancer Research

The purpose of the proposed Planning Meeting described in this application is to bring together a small (20-25 person) group of leaders from Canada's cancer clinical trials community with experts in laboratory-based cancer research to systematically strategize about how to best use current "resources" of the NCIC Clinical Trials Group (NCIC CTG) to conduct research that addresses delivering "personalized" care to cancer patients. The NCIC CTG is an academically-based cancer clinical trials cooperative group (network) that includes more than 1000 investigators from across Canada who are based at 80 treatment centres. NCIC CTG "resources" refer to the comprehensive clinical trials data base that comes from conducting more than 400 trials involving almost 70,000 patients over the past 30 years, and the biospecimen repository (e.g., tumour specimens, blood samples) that reside within the Group's Tissue / Tumour Data Repository at Queen's University. The reference to "personalized" care means understanding unique features of a patient's cancer, most often related to specific genetic patterns of the cancer, for which there is a preferred therapy. For instance, two patients with the same form of cancer (e.g., two patients with colon cancer) may have tumours that under the microscope appear identical. However, the tumours from these two patients may in fact have very different genetic "signatures" and warrant different therapies. The NCIC CTG has previously been able to use its clinical data and biospecimen repository to determine such individualized therapies. The purpose of the planned meeting is to bring together a small but diverse group who can strategize about how, using the "resources" that exist today, we should move forward in a systematic manner. A series of specific objectives are included in the application, including foremost, the aim for this group to submit a high-impact peer review grant by the fall of 2012.