Indy-based Big Ten Cancer Research Consortium making nationwide impact
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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowOn the court, the teams that make up the Big Ten Conference are rivals. But for the last 12 years, researchers from each university have teamed up to fight one opponent: cancer.
The idea for the Big Ten Cancer Research Consortium emerged from the IU Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer in Indianapolis and its former director, Dr. Patrick Loehrer.
The consortium’s administrative headquarters are located at the Hoosier Cancer Research Network in Indy. The Simon Cancer Center is a member and so is the Purdue University Institute for Cancer Research.
“The consortium is 16 universities and cancer centers working together to advance clinical research. The way to describe is it they’re really doing clinical trials together,” Hoosier Cancer Research Network CEO Brian Stemme said. “By working together, they can leverage their individual strengths [and] they can recruit patients from a broader patient population.”
Each cancer center adds its own expertise, and 18 groups of researchers focus on different types of cancer.
“There’s been over 1,000 patients that have enrolled in Big Ten trials; each one of those patients looking for a new option with their cancer diagnosis,” Stemme said. “We work with a set of researchers at each university, and the ideas that they’re bringing forward for trials are actually their ideas that they’ve experienced by working with patients directly.”
The Big Ten CRC, which uses the Big Ten Conference’s official logo, specializes in something known as investigator-initiated trials. That means a researcher, like a medical school professor, comes up with a concept and creates a clinical trial, rather than an organization like a drug company developing a project.
The goal is to combine expertise and resources to accelerate the development of new cancer treatments and therapies, especially through smaller clinical trials or research by newer scientists still building their publication records. For each trial that gets approved, a senior researcher is paired up with a younger researcher.
“They can work together on moving these trials ahead and hopefully be building the next set of future investigators to run clinical trials in the future,” Stemme said.
The Big Ten CRC—like the athletic conference—is growing coast to coast.
In February, the consortium added the Fred Hutch Cancer Center, which collaborates with the University of Washington School of Medicine.
Stemme said the Big Ten CRC is working to add the cancer centers affiliated with the other new Big Ten schools from the West Coast, including UCLA, USC, and Oregon.
“It’s exciting, because we’re going to be able to spread these ideas and these trials to more parts of the U.S.,” he said.