Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson has announced a new public-private partnership that joins the National Institutes of Health (NIH), other research organizations, and five pharmaceutical manufacturers. The partners will provide approximately $6 million to cancer centers to design and implement new approaches to increase patient participation in early-stage trials.

"Early-phase clinical trials are essential to getting research out of the laboratories and into full-scale testing," Thompson said. "By increasing participation in these early trials, this public-private partnership should move us more quickly toward proven treatments that will help cancer patients."

"The goal of the collaboration is to increase the percentage of newly diagnosed cancer patients who participate in Phase I and II clinical trials to very successful levels, like those in pediatric cancer trials," said Andrew C. von Eschenbach, M.D., NCI director. "Participation in early-phase trials is critical to the success of translational research, and this public/private venture will give cancer research a vital boost."

These earliest phases of clinical research, which are designed to test the safety and efficacy of drugs and to determine the best way to administer them, are necessary for researchers to discover potential new treatments that emerge from laboratories and hold promise for cancer patients.

"A top priority at NIH is to translate discoveries into tangible benefits for patients and their families. This collaboration on cancer trials will serve as a model to help accelerate the pace of clinical trials research in other diseases, " said Elias Zerhouni, M.D., NIH director.

The five pharmaceutical partners are Aventis, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly and Company, GlaxoSmithKline, and Novartis.

SOURCE:
National Institutes of Health (http://www.nih.gov)