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Frontier Science Receives Global HIV/Cervical Cancer Coordinating Center Prime Award From The NCI

Frontier Science & Technology Research Foundation is the proud recipient of a five-year, $7.1 million dollar award from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Division of Cancer Prevention (DCP) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The award will be used to set up and manage the coordinating center for the HIV/Cervical Cancer Prevention ‘CASCADE’ Clinical Trials Network.

The CASCADE Clinical Trials Network seeks to conduct pragmatic clinical trials that evaluate the effectiveness of clinically proven interventions to optimize the cervical cancer screening, management and precancer treatment cascade among women living with HIV. Evidence from these trials will be used to inform clinical practice guidelines and improve the implementation of cervical cancer prevention and control programs.

The network will conduct its trials in resource-constrained settings in low-and middle-income countries and regions with health disparities in the United States, and will focus on the scientific areas of increasing screening uptake, improving the management of screen positives, facilitating precancer treatment access, and optimizing precancer treatments for cervical cancer prevention.

“The CASCADE network is crucial when it comes to women’s health and HIV research. Cervical cancer screening and, precancer treatments can potentially alleviate serious disease in women living with HIV, and it’s fantastic that the NCI and NIH are securing funding for these types of initiatives,” says Sue Siminski, Chief Executive Officer of Frontier Science and Contact PI of the CASCADE Network Coordinating Center (CNCC). “Frontier Science is delighted to be the prime awardee of the coordinating center, and capitalize off its decades-long experience in providing data management expertise globally to conducting HIV and cancer research.”

The CNCC will be responsible for providing overall network coordination and facilitating scientific review of network clinical trial concepts and protocols, overseeing centralized data management for network clinical trials, and conducting independent risk-appropriate auditing of network clinical trials.

Frontier Science partners with the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW) and University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Dr. KyungMann Kim, Professor of Biostatistics and Statistics at the UW’s Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics, will direct network coordination and related research support as MPI, while Dr. Anna Barbara Moscicki, Professor of Pediatrics at UCLA, Division Chief of Adolescent Medicine, will direct the conduct of independent risk-appropriate auditing of network clinical trials and provide scientific and medical expertise to the coordinating center.

“We have previously collaborated on a number of successful projects with both UW and UCLA, so we are building off of a strong foundation when it comes to the CASCADE network,” says Siminski. “We take pride in our collaborations, and know that these solid, long standing partnerships will ensure the success and impact of the network and its trials.”

The CNCC will be housed at Frontier Science’s main office in Amherst, New York. For more information, please visit “Launching CASCADE: A Clinical Trials Network to Optimize Cervical Cancer Screening and Precancer Treatment for the Vulnerable Population of Women Living With HIV,” originally published by the National Cancer Institute. For questions, contact the NCI DCP at CancerPreventionBlog@mail.nih.gov.

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