The National Cancer Institute has awarded a prestigious five-year Research Specialist Award (R50) to oncologist Marie Wood, MD, a renowned leader in cancer research at the University of Colorado Anschutz who aims to expand the scope of clinical trials to help more people, particularly those who haven’t gotten cancer yet and those who have survived the disease.
Clinical trials are not just a way to test out new treatments, explains Wood, a professor of medical oncology at the CU Anschutz Department of Medicine and medical director of the Hereditary Cancer Program at the CU Cancer Center. These trials also create opportunities for researchers to learn the best ways to support cancer survivors and prevent cancer from happening in the first place — but to reach these findings, community members’ participation is essential.
Wood says there is a critical need to increase the number of people enrolled in clinical trials, particularly people from underrepresented groups, as well as a need for more clinical trials that are focused on cancer screening, prevention, and survivorship. With support from the R50 grant, she aims to tackle these issues through a three-pronged approach: increasing the variety of clinical trials, involving more health care workers in clinical trials, and enhancing community outreach and engagement work.
“Clinical trials help us learn about not only cutting-edge treatments, but also ways that we can screen for cancer, prevent it, and help patients have better outcomes and live more full lives,” Wood says. “This is a hugely significant grant. It supports all the work that I do nationally, and it allows me to have protected time to continue and expand these efforts.”
Wood, who completed her medical school and fellowship training at the CU Anschutz School of Medicine, was drawn to the field of oncology because it offers the chance to help people in a variety of ways, whether it be treating their cancer, preventing a recurrence of the disease, or helping them manage their condition.
“What inspires me is that you can really help people regardless of what you do,” she says. “It’s a privilege to walk this walk with patients.”
It was during her fellowship that Wood discovered a passion for studying cancer genetics, particularly the potential of genetic testing to identify people who are at a higher risk of getting the disease. Now, Wood is a national leader in cancer screening and prevention research, helping lead pivotal clinical trials that focus on areas like multi-cancer early detection blood tests.
“These blood tests can identify people who potentially have early-stage malignancies. They can identify cancers like esophageal, pancreas, or ovarian, which is valuable because we don’t have great screening tools for those,” she says. “But we don’t really know how to best incorporate these tests into our standard of care screening. We still need to learn who is the right patient population for these tests and how frequently we should do these tests.”
Through her R50 grant, Wood hopes to promote more clinical trials aimed at answering these lingering questions, as well as other trials focused on the areas of prevention and survivorship — such as trials that examine caregiver support and financial burdens that cancer patients can face.
“Previously, a lot of these trials on prevention and survivorship were not available because they didn’t have champions,” says Wood, the former medical director of the Cancer Clinical Trials Office (CCTO) at the CU Cancer Center. She helped launch a new team within the CCTO that focuses on cancer prevention and survivorship.
“Having a collaborative team focused on prevention and survivorship really gives these trials a home,” she says. “We’re not just focused on one type of cancer, but on preventing multiple types and tackling issues that affect survivors.”
In addition to promoting more clinical trials on cancer prevention and survivorship, Wood also aims to get more advanced practice providers (APPs), who are health care providers such as nurse practitioners and physician assistants, to act as site principal investigators (PIs). A site PI is the person who leads the research being conducted at a specific location as part of a clinical trial. For instance, in a large national clinical trial, there will be studies performed at multiple sites across the country, and each of those locations will have a site PI.
Traditionally, site PIs have been physicians or scientists with doctoral degrees. However, more recently, there has been an increasing movement to educate and empower APPs to become site PIs as well.
“I want to help mentor APPs so that they, too, can be a site PI for clinical trials. I believe this will help us get more patients enrolled in clinical trials, because it will allow our APPs to identify which patients would be a good fit for a clinical trial and enroll them into it,” she says.
To do this work, Wood is collaborating closely with Carlin Callaway, DNP, RN, an assistant professor and lead APP in the medical oncology division. Together, they are connecting with APPs throughout the cancer center to educate them about the process of becoming a site PI.
“In the upcoming years, I hope we’ll be able to empower more APPs, because I think this is an important group of providers who deserve greater recognition and opportunities,” Wood says.
Collaborating with the Office of Community Outreach and Engagement (COE) at the CU Cancer Center is another key aspect of Wood’s grant, she explains. This office regularly collaborates with cancer center teams on initiatives centered around prevention and survivorship, with the ultimate goal of reducing the burden of cancer on patients in Colorado.
Many members of the public do not know there are clinical trials related to cancer prevention and screening that they can get involved in, which is why Wood is striving to foster a close collaboration between the cancer center’s COE and the clinical trials office to raise more awareness.
“This is a focused effort to improve community engagement so we can find more ways for us to work together and spread the word about these clinical trials to people in our communities,” she says.
Through these engagements, Wood also hopes to connect with more people who are traditionally underrepresented in clinical trials, such as people living in more rural areas.
“From this grant, I hope we’ll see more patients, from a variety of backgrounds, involved in clinical trials that center around prevention and survivorship,” Wood says. “We gain important insights from clinical trials. This work really aims to expand the types of trials that we can offer to our patients and to people who are at risk of getting cancer.”