There are many examples of successful National Cancer Institute (NCI) programs that span every part of our research enterprise. With this special issue of the NCI Cancer Bulletin, we are honoring a program that has come to represent the very definition of success: the Community Clinical Oncology Program (CCOP).

In 1982, a Request for Applications was issued soliciting participants for a unique program that would bring together community hospitals, the growing cadre of community oncologists, and other local health care providers into a nationwide network for conducting cancer clinical trials. Who could have imagined just how effective this program would become? But here we are, more than 20 years later, with CCOPs having enrolled more than 172,000 patients into cancer treatment and prevention trials.  Read more  

This past June, when the NCI Clinical Trials Working Group focused on the ongoing need to increase recruitment of minority populations to cancer clinical trials, a key element of their proposed solution was to fund more Minority-Based Community Clinical Oncology Programs (MB-CCOPs), and for good reason. Over the last decade, more than 5,500 minorities have enrolled in both treatment and prevention clinical trials sponsored by NCI through the MB-CCOP network.  Read more  

The NCI Cancer Bulletin is produced by the National Cancer Institute (NCI). NCI, which was established in 1937, leads the national effort to eliminate the suffering and death due to cancer. Through basic, clinical, and population-based biomedical research and training, NCI conducts and supports research that will lead to a future in which we can identify the environmental and genetic causes of cancer, prevent cancer before it starts, identify cancers that do develop at the earliest stage, eliminate cancers through innovative treatment interventions, and biologically control those cancers that we cannot eliminate so they become manageable, chronic diseases. For more information on cancer, call 1-800-4-CANCER or visit http://www.cancer.gov. NCI Cancer Bulletin staff can be reached at ncicancerbulletin@mail.nih.gov.