Efficient Management of a Publicly Funded Cancer Clinical Trials Portfolio

The implementation, management, and reporting of any single well-designed cancer clinical trial is an extremely complex and expensive undertaking. However, within our group, there is the opportunity to simultaneously design, implement, monitor, and analyze up to approximately 100 publicly funded clinical trials across the development spectrum. Operationally, we aggressively seek to optimize and standardize processes and software that are common across studies, increase efficiency, and focus on the quality and reliability of study results. Implementing novel software applications increases the quality and efficiency of data evaluation, monitoring, and statistical analysis across multiple disease and study types. Conventions and cross-study tools are the key to quality monitoring and analysis of complex portfolio of studies. A strategy of fully utilizing the commonalities across the trials leads to better quality results of any given study in the portfolio as well as more efficient utilization of public funds to conduct the studies. In this chapter the structure and processes are described in the context of SWOG Cancer Research Network, one of the four National Clinical Trial Network (NCTN) adult cancer clinical trial groups funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) under a cooperative agreement with the US National Cancer Institute (NCI).