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Ken Cowan, M.D., Ph.D. |
St. Francis Medical Center in Grand Island, Great Plains Regional Medical Center in North Platte and Regional West Medical Center in Scottsbluff all have been designated Eppley Cancer Center affiliation sites.
Talks are underway with two other Nebraska hospitals including, Good Samaritan in Kearney and St. Elizabeth in Lincoln, in hopes of establishing affiliation agreements with those hospitals in the next six months.
“These agreements will allow cancer patients across Nebraska to have access to clinical trials currently available at UNMC,” said Ken Cowan, M.D., Ph.D., director of the UNMC Eppley Cancer Center.
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“The agreement gives them the ability to be recognized for their cancer care and research activities, and it connects our oncologists with their physicians, nurses and pharmacies in their communities,” Dr. Cowan said.
Before any clinical trials are offered at the sites, he said, the UNMC principal investigators involved will make site visits to establish the proper protocol procedures with the doctors, nurses and pharmacists in the participating communities. Once those are in place the hospitals will begin offering the clinical trials to their patients.
“They have agreed to enroll at least 10 percent of their patients into the clinical trials offered,” Dr. Cowan said.
All of the data collected will be submitted electronically through the National Cancer Institute’s Web based clinical trial software package, which the Eppley Cancer Center has access to as a NCI designated cancer center.
“The goal is to make the transfer of information as seamlesss as possible,” Dr. Cowan said.
One of the first protocols that will be offered to patients at participating sites is to enroll in the breast cancer registry.
The registry, Dr. Cowan said, will establish a breast cancer biospecimen bank to assess the risk and prognostic factors for patients in Nebraska.
It would be the first statewide registry of its kind, he said.
Once established, Dr. Cowan said he hopes to expand it to other types of cancers.
The cancer biospecimen bank would be used to look for biomarkers of disease for early detection, targeted therapeutics and a better prognosis for cancer patients at the molecular level, he said.
“We want to provide the best cancer diagnosis, treatment and prevention to every patient in the state,” Dr. Cowan said of the affiliation agreement and cancer registry. “Our goal is to expand these affiliations to include every major hospital cancer treatment facility around the state so that every person in Nebraska would have access to our clinical trials if they are interested.”