Project Summary
Despite the decline in overall mortality and incidence of cancer in the US population, disparities in cancer care
still largely exist within certain groups. One key barrier causing the lack of proportional representation of these
groups is the lack of dedicated efforts employing scientific rigorous approaches and implementation strategies
for increasing their proportional representation in clinical trials. The Connecting Underrepresented Populations
to Clinical Trials (CUSP2CT) program aims to implement and evaluate multilevel and culturally tailored outreach
and education interventions that will increase the accrual of underrepresented populations in clinical trials. To
support the CUSP2CT program, we are proposing to be the Data, Evaluation, and Coordination Center (DECC)
to support the data and evaluation activities and coordinate a learning collaborative towards mitigating the key
barriers of cancer disparity. Specifically, we will collaborate with the CUSP2CT U01 investigators and interact
with involved NCI staff members and with other stakeholders, as needed, to carry out the following activities: 1)
establish effective and efficient administrative processes and infrastructure through scientific leadership,
organizational processes, governance structure, effective oversight and operational procedures to achieve
optimal communication, collaboration, coordination, and dissemination of the CUSP2CT research, 2) facilitate
and coordinate data collection and management across the CUSP2CT program to facilitate evidence generation
and rapid dissemination of methods and tools, 3) organize and facilitate collaborative efforts on program
evaluation, engagement, and communication, and 4) foster a learning collaborative in leading and coordinating
trans-CUSP2CT research.
We are uniquely positioned to be the DECC for CUSP2T leveraging strong track record in: (i) implementing
health equity centers and consortia (e.g. Dr. Odedina is MPI on NCI CRCHD U54 CaRE2 Health Equity Center
and contact MPI for a newly awarded Department of Defense iCCaRE for Black Men Consortium); (ii) leading
statistics and data management coordinating center effort in cancer trials (e.g., Mayo is the Statistics and Data
Management Center of the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology (Alliance) including both interventional and
NCORP grants); (ii) leading standardization and interoperability for practice and research (e.g., Mayo has been
contributing to the NCI Terminology Service Development Effort and part of the data harmonization efforts in the
NCATS Clinical Data to Health (CD2H)). Additionally, we have strong institutional priorities aligning with
CUSP2CT with existing infrastructure and resources supporting the CUSP2CT mission.
