Integrating Early-Stage Drug Development with Clinical Networks; Challenges and Opportunities: The City of Hope Developing Experience

Recent data suggest that patients with advanced cancer who participate in biomarker/genomically informed early-stage clinical trials experience clinical benefit. While most early-stage clinical trials are conducted in major academic centers, the majority of cancer patients in the United States are treated in community practices. Here, we describe ongoing efforts at the City of Hope Cancer Center to integrate our network community oncology clinical practices into our academic, centralized biomarker/genomic-driven, early-stage clinical trial program to build an understanding of the approaches that provide the benefits of early-stage clinical trial participation to community patients. Our efforts include three key initiatives: the development of a virtual “Refractory Disease” phase 1 trial matching televideo clinic, the construction of infrastructure to support the expansion of phase 1 clinical trials to a distant regional clinical satellite hub, and the implementation of an enterprise-wide precision medicine, germline, and somatic testing program. Our work at City of Hope may serve as an example to facilitate similar efforts at other institutions.