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. 2010 Nov 20;28(33):5011-6.
doi: 10.1200/JCO.2010.31.2603. Epub 2010 Oct 18.

Infrequent tumor initiative of the Children's Oncology Group: initial lessons learned and their impact on future plans

Alberto S Pappo  1 , Mark Krailo, Zhengjia Chen, Carlos Rodriguez-Galindo, Gregory Reaman
Affiliations

Infrequent tumor initiative of the Children's Oncology Group: initial lessons learned and their impact on future plans

Alberto S Pappo et al. J Clin Oncol. .

Erratum in

  • J Clin Oncol. 2011 Feb 20;29(6):779

Abstract

The merger of the Pediatric Oncology Group, Children's Cancer Group, the Intergroup Rhabdomyosarcoma Study Group, and the National Wilms Tumor Study Group in 2000 offered the newly formed Children's Oncology Group (COG), an opportunity to study rare cancers that had not been the subject of organized evaluation within the context of a cooperative group. In 2002, the COG formed the rare tumor committee which is comprised of four subcommittees. This article details the experience of the infrequent tumor subcommittee for the period of 2002 to 2007. During the initial implementation of this strategy, we have observed low rates of registration within the COG registry and low levels of participation in open banking, biology, and first-line therapeutic studies. This initial experience has allowed us to develop alternative strategies to increase registration rates and clinical trial enrollments. It is hoped that these new plans will allow us to increase our ability to better understand the biology and improve the treatment outcome of young patients with infrequent cancers. Furthermore, our initial experience has demonstrated to us the potential power of expanded cooperation and collaboration at a global level.

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Conflict of interest statement

Authors' disclosures of potential conflicts of interest and author contributions are found at the end of this article.

Figures

Fig 1.
Fig 1.
Incidence of various malignancies using the International Classification of Childhood Cancer in patients 0 to 19 years of age according to the Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results Program database from 2003 to 2007.
Fig 2.
Fig 2.
Number of observed cases in the Children's Oncology Group registry compared with the expected number of cancer cases in the Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results Program database for diagnoses of melanoma, thyroid carcinoma, adrenocortical carcinoma, and nasopharyngeal carcinoma.
Fig 3.
Fig 3.
Expected cases of thyroid carcinoma when compared with expected cases of the same disease in the Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results Program database according to age. Note the increase in the gap for Children's Oncology Group registration rates as patient get older.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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