Grant will fund Center for International Bone Marrow and Transplant Research’s Clinical Trials Network
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(HealthNewsDigest.com) – The Medical College of Wisconsin has received a $44.9 million, 6-year grant from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute to fund the Data and Coordinating Center (DCC) Consortium involved in supporting the Blood and Marrow Transplant Clinical Trials Network. This is the largest grant in the Medical College’s history.
Mary Horowitz, M.D., M.S., is the primary investigator. Dr. Horowitz is the Robert A. Uihlein, Jr. Professor in Hematologic Research and a professor of medicine in hematology and oncology at the Medical College of Wisconsin. She is also the chief scientific director of the Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research (CIBMTR), which is housed at the Medical College of Wisconsin.
The DCC Consortium, which is comprised of the CIBMTR, the National Marrow Donor Program, and the EMMES Corporation (which offers protocol planning, monitoring and coordination), supports the clinical trials network by developing, prioritizing and managing high-quality clinical trials for the network.
The CIBMTR offers a unique resource of data and statistical expertise to the scientific community. More than 400 medical centers worldwide that perform blood and bone marrow transplants share data on outcomes, and the CIBMTR’s Statistical Center maintains that clinical database.
The data, along with the analytic support offered by the CIBMTR, allows the Clinical Trials Network to complete high quality clinical trials that focus on the most important barriers to transplant success. The network, which was established in 2001, has launched more than 25 multi-center trials involving nearly 4,000 patients in the United States. Those trials have resulted in 15 published papers, with another five in pre-publication.
“We have created the opportunity for greatly expanded global collaboration in data exchange, and contributed substantially to the success of a multicenter clinical trials network in blood and bone marrow transplantation,” said Dr. Horowitz. “The CIBMTR continues to play a unique role in facilitating clinical research in hematopoietic cell transplantation.”
Joseph Kerschner, M.D., interim dean and executive vice president of the Medical College, added, “The CIBMTR is unique in what it offers to researchers and clinicians all over the world. The data we offer provides the very best information for safety, efficacy, best practices, and best patient outcomes. This allows us to continue to grow that knowledge bank, to measure the success of our current treatments, and evaluate new therapies.”
CIBMTR (Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Minneapolis, Minnesota) is a research organization formed in 2004 from the affiliation of the International Bone Marrow Transplant Registry of the Medical College of Wisconsin and the research operations of the National Marrow Donor Program. It is an outcomes registry collecting data from hundreds of transplant centers worldwide. CIBMTR brings to the Network:
• A strong record of clinical research and publications in hematopoietic cell transplant and statistical methodology;
• A long history of effective collaborations with a large network of transplant centers;
• Key personnel with combined training in both clinical HCT and biostatistics; and
• An extensive clinical database of almost all allogeneic transplantations and most autologous transplantations performed in the United States.
NMDP (Minneapolis, Minnesota) was established in 1987. It is the world leader in HCT donor and graft procurement issues, and operates the world’s largest HCT-related biorepository. It provides:
• Experience with a large network of donor, collection, and transplant centers;
• A skilled Contracts and Purchasing Department that manages contracts with 170 transplant centers, and maintains contractual relationships with specimen repositories and contract laboratories;
• An experienced Office of Patient Advocacy that provides educational and counseling services to patients in need of a transplant; and
• A Donor Search and Procurement office that facilitates most of the unrelated donor transplants performed in the United States.
The EMMES Corporation (Rockville, Maryland) is a contract research organization established in 1978, which has managed more than 300 phase I-III trials and registries in the past 10 years. EMMES provides experience in:
• Planning, implementing, and managing multicenter clinical trials in a variety of areas including HCT;
• Clinical trial design and management;
• Designing and implementing complex data collection systems; and
• Site monitoring and regulatory support.
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