Duarte-based cancer and diabetes clinical research and hospital organization City of Hope has launched a national network for clinical trials.

The network enables City of Hope to conduct clinical trials at multiple locations simultaneously within its organization. The aim is to speed up the clinical trial process and bring new treatments for cancer, diabetes and other diseases more rapidly to patients.

Multi-site clinical trials have been around for decades, with many now spanning the globe. But typically, the pharmaceutical company or academic research institution has to recruit independent clinical trial centers to participate, which can be a lengthy and complicated process. City of Hope’s innovation has been to create a centralized digital hub that can quickly set up multiple locations within its own geographic network to conduct simultaneous clinical trials for a particular drug or technology.

Increasing access

The other advantage is that this network brings the latest in cancer therapeutic research to more City of Hope patients across a wider geographic area.

“Whether a trial is sponsored by the (National Institutes of Health), by a pharmaceutical company or is studying an investigational medicine developed right here at City of Hope, the remarkable function of our new national model is the ability for a single institution to enroll patients in communities who don’t typically have access to these types of leading-edge trials,” Edward Kim, vice physician-in-chief, City of Hope National Medical Center and system director for clinical trials, said in the announcement.

In the first few months since the clinical trials network launched, nine clinical trials across solid tumors and blood cancers are running at 12 City of Hope sites. The new digital hub has allowed patient enrollment in these clinical trials to move faster than previous expectations, according to the announcement.

This national clinical trial network was made possible through City of Hope’s $390 million purchase in February 2022 of Cancer Treatment Centers of America, which at the time had major cancer research centers near Atlanta, Chicago and Phoenix, along with three other outpatient centers. This gave City of Hope a national reach for the first time in its 112-year history.