SWOG is a network built on more than 1,300 member institutions that participate in and help develop our clinical trials. They are quite a diverse group, ranging from small private practices to academic powerhouses. 

Among our main member, non-LAPS institutions, Lahey Hospital and Medical Center, based north of Boston, in Burlington, Massachusetts, is a great choice to profile. It’s a Tier-1 site within our group and has been a SWOG main member since 2011.

Within the NCI’s National Clinical Trials Network, six component sites in Massachusetts and New Hampshire are registered under Lahey, including affiliate site St. Joseph Hospital in Nashua, New Hampshire.

Lahey’s site principal investigator (site PI) is Paul Hesketh, MD, who also directs the Lahey Cancer Institute and the Sophia Gordon Cancer Center. 

Dr. Hesketh is well known across SWOG. He chairs our professional review committee, which reviews applications for institutional membership and is charged with investigating allegations of research misconduct. It was in that role that he presented at our group meeting plenary several years ago, on the topic of research integrity and accountability.  

He also chairs our lung committee’s community engagement subcommittee, or CESC, which has become a model for how our other research committees might approach efforts to better integrate members from community oncology practices. The CESC may now be SWOG’s best-known subcommittee (though this may be a toss-up with pharmaceutical science’s drug information subcommittee). 

The lead oncology research professional (lead ORP) at Lahey Hospital and Medical Center is Julie Roache, BS, who manages the institution’s research programs in hematology and oncology.

Together, she and Dr. Hesketh represent a Lahey roster for SWOG that includes 42 active investigators and 41 active associates.

As such, Lahey is certainly not our largest member site, but they have regularly made appearances on our lists of top-accruing and top-performing sites. 

Last year, to help our data management sites better track their performance relative to other sites, SWOG rolled out a new metric based on the quality and timeliness of an institution’s data and biospecimen submissions. 

In our first presentation of this new metric, at our spring 2024 group meeting, Lahey Hospital and Medical Center placed second on our list of top performers. This was after garnering a spot on the list of top-accruing LAPS or main member sites at our previous group meeting.

Given their propensity for high performance, it should be no surprise that Lahey was one of the first two sites nationwide to open our Pragmatica-Lung trial – a mere three days after activation. Or that they registered the first patient enrolled to that trial (Paul Hesketh was, of course, the enrolling investigator). 

True to form, Lahey also closed out Pragmatica-Lung among that study’s top 10 accruers.  

Lahey admirably also directly supports area organizations that address unmet health needs, particularly those that serve underserved groups. In 2024, it awarded nearly $1 million in community health grants to several such organizations. 

In oncology, Lahey pioneered using low-dose computed tomography screening for early detection of lung cancer. In fact, it was the first facility in the country to be accredited as a Lung Cancer Screening Center by the American College of Radiology. It introduced low-dose CT screening in 2012, and since that time has conducted more than 31,000 lung screening exams and scanned more than 9,000 patients. 

SWOG achieves its mission of significantly improving lives through cancer research thanks to the commitment of institutions such as Lahey Hospital and Medical Center. I could not be prouder to lead an organization built on the contributions of such members.

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