More Trials for More Veterans at More VAs in More Communities

This year, November 11th doesn't fall on a Friday, but this is my Veterans Week column, and I'm thrilled I can use it to announce our second VA Storefront Support Program award.

The award goes to the North Florida/South Georgia Veterans Health System, under principal investigator Brittany Rogers, MD, who is assistant chief of hematology/oncology at Malcom Randall VA Medical Center (VAMC) in Gainesville, Florida.

The North Florida/South Georgia team know first-hand the benefits of our VA storefront model – for the last two years they have been a member site within our first storefront consortium, led by the Massachusetts Veterans Epidemiology Research and Information Center (MAVERIC). During those two years with MAVERIC, they opened six NCI-sponsored trials and enrolled 31 veterans, including 17 to Lung-MAP.

Other VAs have taken note.

“The success of our research program, under SWOG leadership, has been noticed by other … sites …, who want to be a part of this incredible opportunity,” Dr. Rogers and her team wrote in their application for this award. The new storefront allows those other sites just that chance. The first two to join the storefront are the Miami VAMC and the James A. Haley Veterans' Hospital in Tampa. Collectively, these institutions serve most of the state of Florida.

MAVERIC was SWOG’s original VA storefront member, joining the group in 2015 and leading a consortium of VAMCs that shared an administrative core, along with organizational and systems expertise, in a hub-and-spoke model. With its centralized trial administration functions and its pooled recruitment targets, the storefront approach also allowed even smaller and more rural VAs to open NCI trials for their patients.

Wanting to replicate this successful model, SWOG and Hope invited applications for a new VA Storefront Support Program in 2022. We awarded that first grant to the South Texas Veterans Healthcare System, based at the Audie L. Murphy Memorial Veterans’ Hospital in San Antonio. 

Known as the SWOG Texas Storefront, this consortium opened with two spoke sites. In its first year, it enrolled more than 30 veterans to NCI trials, and it has since added two additional VA sites.

Making cancer clinical trials, and the benefits and hope that can come with them, accessible to all of our military veterans has been a priority of mine from my first day as SWOG chair (long before that, in fact). So, seeing the progress we’re making toward this goal is extremely fulfilling.

In the last five years, looking only at SWOG-credited accruals, VAs have enrolled more than 700 veterans to NCTN or NCORP trials. This is a huge increase over the numbers we saw a decade ago. It’s the product of hard work by many people at many institutions. 

My thanks go  to The Hope Foundation for Cancer Research, which with this award has now committed well over $1 million in direct grants to VA medical centers to help them open and conduct NCI cancer trials.

Thank you also to our VA committee – guided energetically and wisely by Stephen Bartlett, RPh, MSPH – and to our member programs staff. 

As we close out Veterans Day week, thank you also to our veterans. We hope to continue to honor your service, by working hard to make cancer clinical trials available to as many veterans as possible.