Director's Update: October 7, 2003
Cancer is a large and complex problem with scientific, medical, social, cultural, and economic dimensions. Addressing this problem requires the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to work across institutional and sector boundaries, share knowledge, and bring together the diverse members of the cancer community who can help develop systems-based solutions to the many-faceted cancer problem.
Collaboration and partnership must play a critical role in NCI's work toward eliminating the suffering and death due to cancer. We are increasingly looking beyond our institutional boundaries to engage in partnerships with public, private, and academic sectors. Our current partnerships are playing a key role in accelerating progress against cancer, and I believe the future of cancer research will depend on our ability to forge and maintain new and ever more innovative relationships. Such partnerships and alliances will enable the cancer community to nurture an integrated approach to fighting cancer and ensure that research discoveries are translated into clinical and public health interventions that can be delivered to all who need them. Effective partnerships can eliminate bottlenecks, foster an "enabling culture" to accelerate cancer progress, leverage funding from public and private sources, build synergy, and remind us all in the cancer community that we are in this fight together.
One of our most exciting new partnerships - announced this summer - brings together the NCI and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to improve delivery of interventions. As sister agencies of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, we have committed to work together formally to remove bottlenecks in the process of developing and approving safe, more effective new cancer interventions.
As a first step to implementation, we have appointed a task force comprised of key representatives from both agencies. Subcommittees of this task force are meeting to define key areas of mutual interest and concern and to determine specifically how the partnership would function. For instance, the subcommittees are discussing NCI-FDA collaboration in such areas as bioinformatics, clinically meaningful end points, process optimization, and training. The ultimate beneficiaries will be cancer patients and their families.
Our partnership portfolio continues to grow in both size and scope. For example, we are engaged with the FDA and Correlogic Systems, Inc., a private bioinformatics company, in a clinical proteomics initiative to develop a superior approach for early detection of ovarian and prostate cancers based on protein profiling. A clinical trial using protein profiling to monitor ovarian cancer recurrence is under way.
In addition to collaborations with federal and state agencies, the NCI is also working with the private sector. Through the Academic Public Private Partnership Program (AP4), NCI will establish a new paradigm in drug discovery, development, and delivery. The AP4 initiative is fostering collaboration among universities, pharmaceutical companies, biotech companies, and nonprofit organizations to enable discovery of new cancer drugs and their rapid translation to human clinical trials. We are also partnering with the Avon Foundation to advance the fight against breast cancer. Through the "Progress for Patients" program, NCI is supporting a range of innovative translational projects in breast cancer through a pledge received from the foundation. We plan to fund a second set of projects this year.
NCI is also involved in a unique partnership with the Friends of Cancer Research and the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health to overcome barriers to early phase clinical trials. NCI and five pharmaceutical companies together are funding grants to five cancer centers to help them design and implement new approaches to broaden access to and participation in phase I and phase II clinical trials by minority and older Americans.
Innovative collaboration is the future of cancer research. As a result, we at NCI are looking to you to suggest opportunities to expand our role in public-private and other partnerships that will ensure that promising laboratory discoveries are translated into effective - and accessible - preventive and therapeutic interventions.
We owe it to all cancer patients and their families to optimize our efforts against cancer by working together. Through partnership and collaboration we can harvest the fruits of the genomics revolution, with all of its implications for accelerating progress against cancer, to ensure a future where suffering and death from cancer is eliminated.
Andrew C. von Eschenbach, M.D.
Director, National Cancer Institute
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