Co-Chair Wanted: Prevention, Screening, and Surveillance

Dr. Marian Neuhouser, co-chair of our prevention and epidemiology committee for the past decade (ten years next week, in fact!), will step down from that role, as of our fall group meeting.

We’ve launched a national search for a new co-chair to serve alongside current co-chair Dr. Banu Arun to lead a committee renamed to more accurately reflect its evolved scope and mission: the prevention, screening, and surveillance committee.

We want an outstanding, dynamic leader, fully committed to collaborative team science, who will partner with Dr. Arun to: 

• develop scientifically based independent, multidisciplinary prevention, screening, and surveillance research concepts;
• mentor early-career investigators who are interested in designing and running clinical trials in these research areas; and,
• serve as a resource for any SWOG investigator interested in cancer prevention, screening, and surveillance.

Our ideal candidate will be a nationally recognized expert in prevention and early detection, whose expertise includes the planning and/or conduct of clinical trials in prevention, screening, and surveillance. They’ll also have experience working within the NCI’s cooperative group system, or in a similarly complex, multi-institutional setting. 

It’s essential that they have a demonstrated commitment to patients, to collaborating with patient advocates at all stages of trial development, to engaging our community oncology practices, and to diversity and inclusion at all levels.

What do we expect of our committee chairs and co-chairs? They oversee the science in their committee, inspire investigators to develop innovative trial concepts and strategies, and facilitate the development of these concepts and strategies into high-quality protocols for the cooperative group network.

They maintain a comprehensive knowledge of scientific and clinical issues relevant to their committee’s research area, and an awareness of what studies are being planned and conducted in other cooperative groups and institutions.

Our chairs also work with other national leaders (including in the NCI’s Division of Cancer Prevention) to plan new trials and to evaluate proposed concepts and protocols for scientific merit, clarity, and feasibility.

As with all our leadership position openings, we encourage applications from candidates from diverse backgrounds, particularly those underrepresented in cancer research.

We have a pretty strong history to build upon, one that I am more than a little proud of: SWOG’s exemplary track record in the area of cancer prevention includes the landmark Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial, or PCPT, which tested finasteride for chemoprevention, and the Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial (SELECT), which enrolled more than 35,000 participants.

We also conducted the international S0701 trial in six countries in Latin America, which compared three antibiotic regimens to eradicate H. pylori as a measure to prevent gastric cancer, and we led the follow-on S1119 in Lima, Peru, to determine the extent to which public water supplies were a source of H. pylori infection and reinfection.

Over just the past year, three other prevention and epidemiology committee trials – each done in collaboration with a SWOG disease committee – have completed accrual and are now in follow-up: S0820 PACES, S1823, and S1904 MiCHOICE.

Last year our public charity, The Hope Foundation for Cancer Research, acknowledged the explosion of cancer prevention research opportunities by instituting the Linda and Frank Meyskens Annual Endowed Lectureship on Advances in Cancer Prevention (Dr. Gary Goodman, a past co-chair of SWOG’s prevention committee, delivered the first Meyskens Lecture this spring in Seattle).

This remains a core research area for SWOG. If you know an ideal candidate to co-lead in this area going forward (or are an ideal candidate), please reach out. Candidates should send a CV or NIH biosketch with a one-page vision statement to lesliew@ohsu.edu by August 15, 2024.

Thanks for your help in continuing SWOG’s stellar record of accomplishment in cancer prevention research!

ASH Publication Deadline Approaching:

Abstracts for the 2024 ASH Annual Meeting and Exposition are due to ASH by August 1st.

Your deadline for submitting ASH abstracts to SWOG’s Publications Office at pubs@swog.org is 
July 23, 2024, end-of-business ET. 

As you prepare your abstracts, please remember the requirements outlined in SWOG Policy 24:
It is requested that abstracts prepared for submission to any society meetings or seminars be submitted to the Group Office (pubs@swog.org) no later than two weeks prior to submission, or as determined by contractually bound timelines, to allow for authorship review and circulation to appropriate NCI and industry reviewers.