Collecting and analyzing the data
The SDMC will be led by Charles Kooperberg, PhD, Ziding Feng, PhD and Katherine Guthrie, PhD. Additional CCC investigators include Charles Drescher, MD, Vida Henderson, PhD, PharmD, Rachel Issaka, MD, MAS, Paul Lampe, PhD and Matthew Triplette, MD, MPH. Issaka holds the Kathryn Surace-Smith Endowed Chair in Health Equity Research. Ying Huang, PhD, and Catherine Tangen, PhD, round out the SDMC team.
The CCC will develop study protocols and train and monitor the nine U.S. organizations that will recruit participants, while the SDMC will lead the statistical designs and manage and analyze the vast amounts of data generated.
“Organizing all this data is not a simple matter,” said Kooperberg. “The key for understanding the value of cancer screening is to look at mortality; that takes a long time.”
He noted that it’s crucial to make sure the tests don’t do harm. What if people taking these tests decide not to pursue other evidence-based screening such as mammograms or colonoscopies? Could the tests detect cancers that don’t require treatment?
“If these tests only identify cancer that you die with and not from, that’s not a good thing,” he said.
Fred Hutch has a long history of spearheading trial coordination efforts and data management for pivotal federal research. Fred Hutch coordinates the Women’s Health Initiative, or WHI, which recruited 160,000 women starting in 1993 and is among the most comprehensive prevention studies in the U.S. The WHI has generated and supported hundreds of research studies. Fred Hutch also leads study design and data collection and analysis for the NCI’s SWOG Cancer Research Network, a similarly structured group for 100 cancer treatment trials.
The evaluation of blood tests for cancer early detection is much more complex than one might think. Fred Hutch has been at the forefront of developing and supporting rigorous studies to evaluate novel cancer screening methods, largely in its role as the data coordinating center for the NCI’s Early Detection Research Network, where both Feng and Etzioni have held key leadership roles.
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