The NCI Community Oncology Research Program: The New Mexico NCORP

The overarching goal of the New Mexico NCORP is to improve the quality of cancer care throughout our catchment area (New Mexico) and to eliminate the tremendous burden of differential cancer health outcomes in multiple populations that we serve by building innovative statewide outreach programs, founded in community-based participatory research methods and scientific collaborations between community health systems and providers with the primary academic affiliate site, leading to increased awareness, acceptance, access, and participation by all New Mexicans in NCI-sponsored cancer screening, cancer control, prevention, therapeutic and cancer care delivery clinical trials. The University of New Mexico Comprehensive Cancer (UNMCCC) serves as the primary academic hub with strong scientific programs in cancer population sciences, cancer control, health outcomes research, and clinical interventions, in partnership with many of the non-academic New Mexico health systems and community cancer care sites that are consortium members of the New Mexico Cancer Research Alliance (NMCRA), a statewide clinical research network that provides major clinical trials infrastructure to support the goals of the NCI NCORP program. We continue to improve patient outcomes through enhanced NCTN clinical trial participation with emphasis on building tissue and data resources to explore the molecular mechanisms and genomic foundations of differing outcomes in multiple populations while serving as a national model of a successful consortium that delivers high quality patient-centered cancer care through innovative efforts in all clinical trial types, for those cancers that have unique patterns in our population. We continue to move towards accomplishing these major goals through the specific aims of the NM NCORP: 1) To improve the quality of statewide cancer care and patient outcomes by increasing access and engagement of our multiple unique populations to cancer screening, cancer control, cancer care delivery trials and NCTN therapeutic, biomarker and imaging trials through community-based partnerships and collaborative research within our NCORP network, 2) To improve the cancer outcomes of our unique New Mexico populations such as American Indian, Hispanic, Caucasian and all rural populations that represent the major state demographics through innovative research as well as begin to address the needs of our adolescent, young adult, and sex demographics and 3) To harness the collective expertise of our university and community partnerships in the NM NCORP to provide leadership and physician/scientist/expert engagement with the NCI Research Bases and NCORP network as a whole through participation on NCTN committees, task forces, strategic planning and other NCTN/NCORP working groups. Our focused research strategy on academic/community team partnerships addresses all aspects of cancer clinical research in to prioritize and optimize trial-based cancer care, while enhancing collaboration with NCORP Research Bases to build the next generation of trials to address the unique cancer challenges of the New Mexicans served by the NCORP.