New cancer screening network announced

Tom Vaughan

Mar 5, 2024 — 1 min read

Fig 1. The Cancer Screening Research Network (CSRN) is comprised of the National Cancer Institute; a Statistics and Data Management Center; a Coordinating and Communication Center; and nine Accrual, Enrollment, and Screening Site Hubs.

In exciting news on the prevention/screening front, The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center is leading a new clinical trials consortium called the Cancer Screening Research Network (CSRN), established by the National Cancer Institute, with the aim of advancing President Biden’s Cancer Moonshot initiative. The CSRN will focus on improving early cancer detection, reducing health inequities, and preventing cancer by evaluating emerging technologies for cancer screening. Fred Hutch will oversee the CSRN’s Coordinating and Communication Center and the Statistics and Data Management Center, focusing on Multi-Cancer Detection assays (MCDs) that identify cancer byproducts in bodily fluids. The research will assess the effectiveness of these tests in early cancer detection and their impact on reducing cancer-related deaths. The initiative emphasizes the importance of rigorous evaluation before promoting these tests in the community, with a key focus on health equity. The CSRN will engage diverse U.S. communities to ensure meaningful and unbiased evaluations of the technologies. The initial Vanguard study will recruit healthy participants aged 45 to 70 to assess a small number of MCD tests, with future trials likely to involve more participants and tests, hopefully including esophageal cancer. The goal is to determine if these tests can decrease illness and death due to cancer, addressing concerns such as potential false positives, impacts on standard-of-care screening, and health disparities.

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This interesting and thoughtful paper by Dr. Elspeth Davies at the University of Cambridge investigates the use of the capsule sponge test for screening Barrett's esophagus (BE) in a mobile clinic in England, highlighting the challenges in balancing patient-centered and risk-centered medical management. Through ethnographic fieldwork, the study

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Neoplastic progression in young Barrett's patients

Diagnosis and management of GERD

Ethics of screening based on race/ethnicity

Tension between risk-based and patient-centered esophageal cancer screening