Clinical trials bring new treatments to Colorado patients, often offering innovative options years before they are available to patients outside academic medicine. The problem is that even after laboratory work and animal studies show the promise of a new cancer treatment, opening and enrolling a human clinical trial requires a painstaking process of planning and approvals. The faster doctors and administrators can accomplish this work, the sooner a clinical trial becomes available. Now a new grant from the National Cancer Institute will help University of Colorado Cancer Center speed this process of clinical trial approval, making more trials available sooner to patients who need them.
“Trials are the lifeblood of the Cancer Center – it’s how we move cancer treatments forward. This grant will help to ensure we’re on the cutting edge of new therapies. The earlier we can get a trial open, the earlier we can start offering it to patients,” says Victor Villalobos, MD, PhD, medical director of the CU Cancer Center Cancer Clinical Trials Office.
The competitive, two-year grant, called a Cancer Clinical Investigator Team Leadership Award (CCITLA), will allow Villalobos to, in his words, “buy some time back from the clinic to focus on being medical director.” His goals include reorganizing the Cancer Clinical Trials Office to improve trials’ time-to-open, a metric that can also entice drug companies to offer new treatments in Colorado.
Between the discovery of a new treatment and its delivery to patients is the often overlooked and incredibly complex process of clinical trial design and approval. And while clinical trial administration may not grab headlines like the discovery of a new way to fight cancer or the first patient who benefits from treatment, the process of deciding exactly how, when and to whom a trial is offered is an essential step toward the ability to more successfully fight the disease. Simply, this CCITLA will allow Villalobos and his team to help Coloradoans fight cancer better.
