The NCI Community Cancer Centers Program (NCCCP) is a three-year pilot program to test the concept of a national network of community cancer centers to expand cancer research and deliver the latest, most advanced cancer care to a greater number of Americans in the communities in which they live. The NCCCP extends the reach of NCI research into more U.S. states, cities, and towns, including rural areas and inner cities.
The NCCCP seeks to:
- Draw more patients into clinical trials in community-based settings.
Patients will have access to the very latest cancer prevention and treatment advances through NCI-sponsored clinical trials. Pilot sites will provide a local point of entry to draw more patients into clinical trials and enable researchers to more rapidly develop and evaluate effective prevention and treatment strategies. - Reduce cancer healthcare disparities.
A major focus of the NCCCP is to help reduce the cancer burden among underserved populations. The NCCCP will actively reach out to these communities, bringing more Americans into the system of care and helping NCI to better understand and address the underlying causes of cancer health disparities. - Prepare sites for standardizing the collection and storage of voluntarily donated biological specimens for cancer research.
With access to a broader cross-section of patients who voluntarily provide tissue and blood samples, researchers will have a greater opportunity to study both normal and cancerous cells. The pilot will assess how NCI’s guidelines for collection and storage of specimens can be applied nationwide to accelerate the development of new treatments for patients. - Link sites to national computer networks that support basic, clinical, and population-based cancer research.
The pilot will assess the ability of sites to link medical information, provided with patient consent, to NCI’s electronic patient data network, Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid™ (caBIG™). Expanding the amount of patient data available to cancer researchers will greatly contribute to our knowledge and treatment of cancer.
