OU Medicine’s Stephenson Cancer Center has been picked to join two more networks of the National Cancer Institute.
One of those is the Experimental Therapeutics Clinical Trials Network, one where OU’s group of collaborators includes cancer centers at Yale, Vanderbilt, University of California San Diego and Columbia.
"And with these collaborating institutions, we’ll be able to participate in earlier phase clinical trials and bring those trials to Oklahoma City for — where our patients can access some very novel therapies," said Stephenson Cancer Center Associate Director of Clinical Research Dr. Kathleen Moore.
The other network is the Cancer Prevention Clinical Trials Network, one that will test interventions to ward off cancer before it develops. Moore said Oklahoma offers a solid proving ground.
"We’re a rural state, we have a very unique ethnic diversity. And so, if we’re developing prevention drugs or new screening technologies, they have to work for all Americans and not just for those that live in big cities," Moore said.
One in four Stephenson Cancer Center patients is treated on a clinical trial, and it has enrolled the most patients in the National Cancer Institute’s National Clinical Trials Network for four straight years.