Documenting Impact and Vision: NCTN Grants Submitted

Support from our current NOC and SDMC awards is due to end one year from today (as does my tenure as your Group Chair!), and the applications we just submitted, if successful, will fund our important work for another six-year cycle.

My overall impressions from this grant application: I’m in awe of what this group has achieved over the last six years, and could not be more excited about SWOG’s future directions and about our next leadership team, starting with our next group chairs – Drs. Primo “Lucky” Lara and Dawn Hershman. 

They led the effort to write our NOC grant renewal, and I’m profoundly grateful for their clear-sightedness and vision throughout this process.

I’m also grateful, as are Drs. Lara and Hershman, for the contributions of so many SWOG members, leaders, and staff to this effort. The grant writing shifted into high gear at last fall’s group meeting, and the final product we just delivered is a nearly 4,000-page, carefully documented narrative of the best of patient-centered team science in oncology research.

The eventual success of this application (and I’m supremely confident in that success, knocking on wood only a thousand times, instead of a million) is built on your success – the impact of SWOG members and institutions over the last six-plus years. This impact has manifested itself in multiple ways during this grant cycle, including: 

• In the 45 SWOG-led NCTN clinical trials activated during the reporting period, and in SWOG’s active contributions to 102 trials led by other NCTN groups.
   
• In the enrollment of almost 15,000 participants to SWOG-led NCTN trials since 2019, and SWOG’s enrollment of an additional 4,569 participants to trials led by other NCTN groups. These totals also include almost 1,000 SWOG-associated accruals from VA sites, an achievement I’m particularly proud of.
   
• In more than 200 peer-reviewed publications linked to NCTN trials (most in journals considered high impact), and almost 300 abstracts presented at scientific meetings. These publications included 63 primary endpoint manuscripts and 51 primary endpoint abstracts, along with 84 secondary endpoint manuscripts and 56 secondary endpoint abstracts. 
   
• In the distillation of those findings into numerous changes in medical practice and specifically into more than a dozen updates to the latest versions of care guidelines published by the National Comprehensive Cancer Network and other organizations, updates that will yield added years and improved quality of life for those with cancer.
   
• In more than half a million annotated biospecimens from SWOG-coordinated trials banked with our partners at Nationwide Children’s Hospital during this grant period, biospecimens that drive translational research projects and secondary analyses that further advance cancer care.
   
• In regular improvements in integrating the patient voice into trial design and conduct, ranging from our innovative approaches to incorporating patient advocate insights starting at the earliest stages of protocol development to our establishment of a Patient-Reported Outcome (PRO) Core, which since 2019 has overseen PRO sub-studies embedded in 38 SWOG treatment trials. We have in general become a much-more patient-centric research organization.

The vision and plans outlined in the grant are truly exciting – for example, concrete steps to more fully engage our community practice sites and members in trial development and execution, and new structures to better integrate (and enable) contributions by our advanced practice providers. We’ll delve into many of those plans in future Front Lines.

The grant’s core aims, however, continue and expand along familiar paths, as expected:

• designing and conducting the most innovative, transformative, high-quality clinical trials
   
• rapidly enrolling groups of participants broadly representative of the larger populations of people with a given disease, ensuring the results of our trials have maximum impact and are generalizable across the disease
   
• cultivating and expanding our incredibly collaborative and productive team science community
   
• nurturing and mentoring our early-career investigators to help them become the seasoned oncology researchers who will lead SWOG’s work over coming grant cycles

Again, I extend my sincere thanks – to Drs. Hershman and Lara for painting such an inspiring vision of the SWOG to come, to our committee leaders and staff who contributed content and expertise in crafting a masterful grant application, and especially to you, our members, for the work you do every single day. 

Ultimately, our operations grant application is an impressive testament to your deep commitment to working collaboratively, to improve the lives of those affected by cancer. I’m looking forward to seeing those efforts continue on into the next grant cycle, and beyond.
 

Spring 2025 Group Meeting: Register Now
Registration opened this week for our spring 2025 group meeting, which will be held April 30 – May 3 in San Francisco. A city-wide event is scheduled for that week, so hotel rooms may quickly become scarce – reserve yours early.