Cancer Center Spotlight: The ACCC Community Oncology Research Institute

Randall Oyer, MD, Medical Director, Ann B. Barshinger Cancer Institute, Oncology Program, Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health, highlights the Association of Community Cancer Centers (ACCC) establishment of the ACCC Community Oncology Research Institute (ACORI) to help build on its mission to improve patient outcomes in cancer care as well as close the gap in community cancer research through partnerships.

Transcript

Hello. I'm Dr. Randall Oyer, a medical oncologist, director of the Ann B. Barshinger Cancer Institute, part of the University of Pennsylvania health system in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I am immediate past president of the Association of Community Cancer Centers, the ACCC. I'm happy to talk to you today.

The ACCC is devoted to improving outcomes from cancer care in the United States, and this means supporting quality, equity, and the teams that provide care.

Equity means getting patients, teams, and communities what they need to thrive. Quality is getting cancer center-level care into communities that don't have cancer centers, through partnership, digital processes, and training.

Cancer treatment research is integral to the improvements we've made in cancer care, and every patient in every community deserves to be offered a clinical trial.

The need for every patient to have access to a cancer treatment trial is why the ACCC developed our Community Oncology Research Institute, which is known as ACORI.

Our mission is to close the gap in community research through optimal partnerships. ACCC is a convener of community sites, academia, regulatory, and industry partners. The ACORI task force comprises 16 high-level oncology leaders across the country.

The ACORI will close the gap in community research by engaging community programs through development of infrastructure and training that builds research capacity, diffusing research into communities by connecting community programs with academic and industry sponsors to get the right trials into communities in an expedited fashion.

I'd like to mention 5 projects that we currently have underway.

First, education series with podcasts and blogs.

Secondly, a clinical trials Lexicon where we explain the words that medical care professionals use every day that patients need to understand to understand a clinical trial and the consent they're providing.

We are hosting a Clinical Trials Stakeholder Summit September 13th through 15th, and we've connected 3 important national studies with ACCC members.

We have a combined project with ACCC and ASCO to increase the enrollment of Black and Hispanic/Latinx patients, people who have traditionally not had equal access to clinical trials, and we've deployed that study into 75 sites across the United States.

Not all people have benefitted equally from cancer research across our country, and we think that that's because of many reasons, but among them that ACORI is addressing are the following 2.

Most cancer patients get their care in a community, yet most clinical trials are performed at academic medical centers to which a minority of patients actually have access. We want to get the trials out from the academic medical center into the community. Additionally, it's clear that many individuals within communities have disproportionately low access to trials.

We want to make sure that communities understand how to open, deploy, and enroll on clinical trials, and we want to make sure that every person—Black, Hispanic, Latinx, or any other underserved population—has equal access to a trial, that we teach providers and teams how to approach patients, how to engage patients, and how to make sure that every person has an equal opportunity to enroll on a clinical trial.

Cancer research belongs in the community, and the community belongs in cancer research.