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About Us
MISSION AND VALUES
Mission
To bring together the best minds in GI cancer research to expedite the discovery and efficient testing of active new compounds for the treatment of GI cancers, enabling sponsors to bring efficacious new drugs to the market to advance the state of care for GI cancer patients.
Objectives
AGICC's primary objectives include:
Advance clinical and translational research in gastrointestinal malignancies through a Consortium of institutions and investigators with expertise in the natural history and molecular biology of GI cancers.
Create an effective model for privately funded clinical and translational research in GI cancers.
Rapidly and efficiently test the efficacy of compounds in development as anti-cancer agents through innovative Phase I and II trials, with the goal of increasing the number of useful compounds available to treat patients with advanced gastrointestinal malignancies.
Background
The Consortium initiative, first proposed by Lawrence Leichman, M.D., Director of the Aptium Oncology GI Cancer Consortium (AGICC), originated from frustration over the lack of compounds currently on the market for GI cancers that could prove effective over the long term, and with the potential for targeting actual cancer-causing molecular events. The use of targeted agents presents opportunities that may reduce the problems associated with cytotoxic drugs that not only kill large numbers of cancer cells, but kill normal tissue as well, typically leading to severe side effects for GI cancer patients.
The challenge was to create a new process for clinical trials that would be faster and more efficient, in order to expedite the identification and testing of targeted agents that are in development but still require evaluation for usefulness. To that end, AGICC assembled the best possible team of institutions and investigators to assist in the design and rapid completion of Phase I and II clinical trials in GI malignancies.
A Request For Application was sent to leading U.S. institutions announcing the formation of AGICC, and seeking applications from interested institutions and investigators for membership in the Consortium. The institutions were selected based upon criteria that included institutional commitment to a GI cancer program, the Principal Investigator's experience and expertise, and clinical research operations.
AGICC officially launched with a kick-off meeting in September 2008 at Christiana Care Healthcare Systems in Newark, Delaware. There, protocols for the first trials in colorectal cancer were discussed, along with plans to enroll the Consortium's first research participants in 2009.
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