Dr Sibel Blau Discusses QCCA, NCCA Collaboration on Exigent Research

Sibel Blau, MD, president and CEO of the Quality Cancer Care Alliance (QCCA), talks about why QCCA and National Cancer Care Alliance (NCCA) launched Exigent Research in July 2022.

Transcript

How does Exigent Research work?

Exigent Research is a network of independent oncologists that do good research and clinical trials in community oncology. Eighty percent of the patients are treated in community oncology, but unfortunately, only about 6.3% of the patients get into clinical trials in the community centers. There are many barriers for that.

At Exigent Research, we brought our strengths and learnings of many years doing research, and because of our data warehouse that has very special features that make it easy for us to do centralized services, we are hoping to reduce the burden of the administrative work and improve patient screening, feasibility, and enrollment into trials, and by dramatically changing how we do research, how we put patients into clinical trials in the community centers. We are going to be also developing technology and tools and really focusing on educating [and] training researchers and changing the mindset on how we do research in the community. That's how Exigent Research works.

Why did QCCA jointly launch Exigent Research with NCCA?

At QCCA, we have worked for years to develop a research network that had the features of the network we have now. In January 2020, just before COVID came, we actually established our research network, started building an infrastructure, and did proof-of-concept trials together [with] different models of research within the QCCA network members.

We have been working closely with NCCA with different projects. About December 2021, we learned that they also would like to do a research network. We're so similar minded and practices are so similar in the ways that [we] do research that we decided to come together. Within 6 months, QCCA and NCCA research came together, and now we have a combined company called Exigent Research Network.