The Nation's Investment in Cancer Research

NCI’s Drug Development Platform

Clinical Research

NCI’s mission includes extensive funding and conducting of clinical research. The Institute supports a vast array of clinical trials designed to test new ways to treat, prevent, detect, or diagnose cancer — as well as new methods to improve cancer patients’ quality of life.

The trials NCI supports take place at the NIH Clinical Center and in many outside institutions, including hundreds of academic or private hospitals, NCI-designated Cancer Centers, NCI Community Cancer Centers, and community-based medical practices located in the United States, Puerto Rico, Canada, and worldwide. This research has helped save or extend the lives of people everywhere.

NCI enrolls thousands of people in more than 150 clinical trials at the NIH Clinical Center each year. Home to a variety of science programs and scientists at many of the 27 institutes and centers that make up NIH, about 40 percent of the Clinical Center’s activity is comprised of studies conducted by the NCI intramural program. A large presence at the Clinical Center provides unique opportunities for NCI to add to its valuable resources and commitment to patient care.

For example, NCI’s Pediatric Oncology Branch led partnerships that facilitated several therapeutic advances first tested in children at the NIH Clinical Center. Among them was the first use of gene therapy, development of volume photography to measure growth of neurofibromatosis-1 tumors, and even the first multi-institute hospital unit designed specifically for children at the NIH Clinical Center.

Beyond the NIH campus in Bethesda, NCI coordinates a network of NCI-designated Cancer Centers, which are principally based at our country’s major research universities. These centers play a vital role in both basic and clinical research. More than half of the extramural researchers funded by NCI work in NCI-designated Cancer Centers. At several NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Centers, for example, scientists are involved in research to develop novel methods that make use of genomic technologies to guide the chemotherapy choices of oncologists, by helping them determine the right drug for a particular patient, based on the patient’s genomic profile. Ongoing clinical trials are studying the use of genomic signatures to guide therapy for breast, ovarian, and other cancers at a number of Comprehensive Cancer Centers.

The 63 NCI-designated Cancer Centers are often referred to as crown jewels. Importantly, the directors of the NCI-designated Cancer Centers recognize that changes are happening across biomedicine, and they are determined to contribute. In a recent report, the directors wrote that “advances in treatment will come from understanding the molecular causes of disease and using combination treatment approaches employing multiple modalities.” That report, “Accelerating Successes Against Cancer,” contains recommendations on goals for NCI and the Cancer Centers to pursue, centering around prevention, early detection, treatment, survivorship, collaborations, and the dissemination of cancer control best practices. NCI is actively engaged in the implementation of those recommendations in consultation with the Centers.

Yet, we also realize that approximately 85 percent of cancer patients receive care in the communities where they live. Receiving treatment at a world-class cancer center is, for too many, not an option. Frailty, age, language capacity, distance, and insurance limitations often keep patients close to home. NCI is deeply involved in fixing that problem, through its NCI Community Cancer Centers Program (NCCCP) that is studying, in a three-year pilot, how best to deliver state-of-the-art care and clinical research to patients in their local communities. Importantly, the 16 NCCCP sites are also focusing nearly half of the resources from this program on overcoming the disparities that lead to intolerable differences in cancer outcomes.

“NCI’s Community Cancer Centers Program is about bringing things closer to home. It’s having the technology and infrastructure in place so our patients in Montana can get NCI Cancer Center level of care and access to clinical trials without having to go live in Denver or Seattle,” said Dr. Tom Purcell of the Billings Clinic Cancer Center, an NCCCP pilot site.