In December 2022, a White House press release highlighted the launch of the HIV/Cervical Cancer Prevention ‘CASCADE’ Clinical Trials Network by the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Frontier Science is the prime awardee for the CASCADE Network Coordinating Center (CNCC).
CASCADE is an initiative under the Cancer Moonshot program which was launched by President Biden with the mission to accelerate the rate of progress against cancer. The press release highlighted other bold deliverables and new announcements from U.S. departments and agencies and the private sector of over $300 million to drastically improve cancer outcomes in Africa and health disparate regions in the United States.
In 2022, the NCI committed $25 million to the CASCADE initiative which is focused on optimizing the cervical cancer screening, management, and precancer treatment cascade for women living with HIV. The network includes partnerships between U.S. research institutions and clinical trials sites in Botswana, Kenya, and Uganda, which are countries that all face high HIV- and cervical cancer-burden. The network will contribute evidence to inform clinical practice guidelines and improve implementation of cervical cancer control on a global scale.
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.
Sue Siminski, Chief Executive Officer of Frontier Science, will serve as Contact PI of the CNCC and oversee the direction of the Data Management and Reporting Unit. Frontier Science partners with the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW) and University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) on the project. 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.