Member Highlight: UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center

The University of California–Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center (CCC) is a lead academic participating site (LAPS) member within the SWOG network, serving as parent site to eight component institutions. A key member for almost four decades, its role and impact are about to become even more integral to SWOG’s work. 

That’s because, with the start of the next NCI National Clinical Trials Network (NCTN) grant cycle, now set for March 1, 2026, the center will become home to our group chair’s office, with UC Davis as the recipient of our core Network Operations Center grant under Dr. Primo Lara, Jr., (contact PI) and Dr. Dawn Hershman (MPI), SWOG’s group chairs-elect.  

Dr. Lara has served as the UC Davis CCC’s director since 2016. Operating under the University of California–Davis and UC Davis Health, the center serves a catchment area of 19 counties surrounding Sacramento county in northern California, and it provides care to more than 100,000 patients each year.  

The center earned NCI designation in 2002, and “comprehensive” status in 2012. It works to reduce the burden of cancer via cutting-edge research, community outreach and engagement, clinical trials, and education of the next generation of cancer investigators through collaborative team science.

That team science ethos drives an innovative research program that engages more than 240 scientists across UC Davis who collaborate to advance discovery and develop new tools to diagnose and treat cancer. 

The center pursues its research mission to establish and promote high-impact interdisciplinary cancer research under five cross-cutting themes:

• cancer risk etiology and risk-based mitigation;
• differential cancer risks and outcomes;
• biomedical technologies, models, and methods;
• personalized medicine strategies; and
• comparative oncology. 

Among other areas, it’s been an innovator in biomedical technologies, having developed and deployed the world’s first high resolution total-body PET scanner, EXPLORER.

Important to SWOG, it’s one of three institutions that piloted the SWOG-nCartes platform for automating the transfer of clinical data from electronic health records into the Rave electronic data capture system. Many other SWOG sites are now following its lead and adopting the platform. 

The NCTN site PI at UC Davis CCC is Dr. David Gandara, who chaired SWOG’s lung cancer research committee for almost two decades and was one of Lung-MAP’s founding PIs. Leslie Garcia, BS, is SWOG’s lead oncology research professional (ORP) at Davis.

Our roster includes more than 60 other UC Davis CCC investigators as well. Here are a few of the SWOG leaders and contributors based at Davis:

• Joyce S. Lee, PharmD, (senior clinical pharmacist at the center) chairs our pharmaceutical sciences committee.
• Jonathan W. Riess, MD, MS, (director of thoracic oncology at the center) was study chair of Lung-MAP’s S1900A sub-study and is now co-chair of what should soon be that trial’s newest sub-study, S1900N, slated to open in February.
• Mamta Parikh, MD, MS, an alum of our 2025 LEAP course, is SWOG study champion for multiple trials and was organizer of a highly successful “Art of Patient Enrollment” symposium at a recent SWOG meeting (if you missed it, the recording is linked here).
• Tianhong Li, MD, PhD, also an alum of our flagship LEAP course, is co-chair of Lung-MAP’s S1800E non-match sub-study and is among the leading enrollers to the LUNGMAP screening protocol.
• Richard Valicenti, MD, (chair of radiation oncology at the center) is co-chair of our S1802 phase III prostate cancer trial.
• Shuchi Gulati, MD, is SWOG study champion for the Alliance A032201 trial in renal cell carcinoma and is GU liaison to our immunotherapeutics committee.

The UC Davis CCC offers patients access to more than 200 clinical trials, including many of SWOG’s. It has long been among the leading enrollers to the Lung-MAP suite of trials, for example, and it’s the top-accruing site to our S2209 phase III trial in multiple myeloma. 

With its long history with SWOG, its exemplary leadership, and its unsurpassed commitment to interdisciplinary cancer research, the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center will be an ideal venue and administrative home from which to continue advancing SWOG’s mission of significantly improving lives through cancer clinical trials and translational research, into the next grant cycle and beyond. I am proud to highlight it in Front Line!