NEW YORK – The National Cancer Center Japan, Precision Medicine Asia (PREMIA), and Paradigm Health on Tuesday established a national clinical trial network aiming to bring more pharmaceutical industry-sponsored lung cancer trials to Japan.
The network, called Lung Cancer Genome Screening Project for Individualized Medicine-Clinical Development (LC-SCRUM-CD), is an expansion of LC-SCRUM-Asia, a cancer genomic screening initiative that involves more than 150 hospitals in Japan.
The organizations will work to simplify workflows and systems to accelerate patient enrollment into clinical trials. Paradigm's experience with rural and community health systems in the US will inform the design and operational development of a platform that supports the LC-SCRUM-CD network. The organizations will advance the network and workflow with the goal of reducing the time doctors and hospital staff spend on clinical trials and the cost of conducting them, while expanding patients' access to research.
Precision Medicine Asia and Paradigm will build on the clinical trials infrastructure created by National Cancer Center Hospital East (NCCHE), which leads the LC-SCRUM-Asia genomic screening network and runs more than 500 trials per year. PREMIA manages the data platform for LC-SCRUM-Asia, which houses a large amount of genetic data gathered from participating patients.
"Working with our partners at PREMIA and Paradigm, we will fully utilize this expertise in clinical trial operations, allowing all patients who are taking part in LC-SCRUM-Asia to benefit from personalized access to the breadth of clinical trials being run by global biopharmaceutical sponsors at the same time as the US," Koichi Goto, chief of the department of thoracic oncology at NCCHE and LC-SCRUM-Asia representative, said in a statement.