Institute urges overhaul of US cancer trials network

The large Clinical Trials Cooperative Group Program sponsored by the US National Cancer Institute has become “inefficient and cumbersome,” says a report from the Institute of Medicine. It needs to be “redesigned to improve value by reducing redundancy and improving effectiveness and efficacy of trials,” it says.

The cooperative group programme involves more than 3100 institutions, 14 000 investigators, and 25 000 patients in clinical trials each year. But it takes two years to plan and initiate a new trial; only about half are ever completed; and funding has fallen by 20% since 2002.

These changes have occurred while basic science has yielded …