Ozark Health Ventures LLC dba Cancer Research for the Ozarks (CRO)

Ozark Health Ventures, LLC d/b/a Cancer Research for the Ozarks (CRO) is submitting this grant application as it desires to continue to be involved with the cooperative efforts of the NCI Community Oncology Research Program (NCORP) to focus on the broader needs of cancer prevention and treatment, cancer care delivery, imaging studies and cancer care of patients who live in rural regions of the network. Cancer Research for the Ozarks has a long and mutually beneficial history with the NCI for over 31 years of offering clinical trial access to rural communities within the central United States. Since its inception, CRO has grown from southwest Missouri, to increasing its network to 15 component sites that incorporate 42 counties in five states with a predominately rural population of more than 4,300,000. CRO would be the primary access for NCI-sponsored and NTCN network trials for the vast majority of these patients. CRO has been a significant contributor to enrollments in protocols involving cancer prevention and treatment, imaging studies, cancer care delivery studies, and tissue procurement protocols. CRO routinely meets the NCI criteria for enrollments and for the number of CCDR protocols it has open. CRO has a plan for further expansion of components and investigators to secure even higher enrollments. CRO participates with the following research bases: Alliance: member since June 2012; NRG: member since their merger in 2014 and the preceding legacy groups; SWOG: member since its inception in 1987; Wake Forest: member since their inception in 2014 and participated in protocols with the preceding Cancer Center; ECOG-ACRIN: member since 2014 and the preceding legacy groups. In addition, CRO has been involved in the Children’s Oncology Group at Mercy St. Louis since June 2011. The major collective strengths of the CRO application would be the tremendous support and commitment of the two primary components, the broad network of component sites, the quality, integrity and experience of CRO’s leadership and the program, and the many investigators and collaborators that it supports.