A NEW DAY IN CANCER TREATMENT - St. Joseph Medical Center

RESEARCHBarriers to effective use of that database are being tackled. The lagtime between patient diagnosis until data availability will be cutdown from years to a short few weeks with the implementation ofthe Cancer Institute’s Rapid Quality Reporting System (RQRS),which we have begun as part of our NCCCP participation. Interlinkingthe various cancer databases with other health databases will multiplythe amount of available data on patients. Much of the stage dataentered has been based on traditional staging measurements, i.e.,tumor size, lymph node involvement etc., which carry some importance.These, however, are being surpassed by more sophisticated indicators ofthe biologic behavior of tumors. Dr. Carolyn Compton, the new head ofthe American Joint Committee on Cancer, believes they should becomea part of the staging system. Better prediction of a particular tumor’sbehavior will help us reduce the utilization of unnecessary treatmentsand design more personalized treatment regimes. Standardizingspecimen handling techniques and maintaining tissue banks that storefresh frozen tissues will be essential to the success of our ambitiouscancer project. This will be aided by the opening of our new Center forTranslational Research (CTR) and participating with the TCGA.Accelerating the pace of cancer treatment progress will require us tobe more creative in research, utilize the large amounts of data that havealready been collected, improve the quality and increase the amount ofinformation in our databases, and move more and more into personalizedmedicine. All these efforts are intended to transform many cancers intoa controlled chronic illness and achieve cures for many others.