SWOG Member Highlight: Heartland NCORP

SWOG’s NCORP member sites are essential contributors in the group’s commitment to bring clinical trial opportunities to all patients affected by cancer and to ensure our trials enroll cohorts broadly representative of those affected by the disease. 

In some years, these community-based networks collectively enroll more than one-half of all participants registered to SWOG-led studies.

One of our premier enrollers in this group of member sites is the Heartland Cancer Research NCORP. Based in Decatur, Illinois, Heartland is a collaborative network built around three primary institutions: Decatur Memorial Hospital, Illinois CancerCare, and Missouri Baptist Medical Center.

With half a dozen additional core sites, each with its own affiliate clinical sites, Heartland NCORP serves most of western Illinois and eastern Missouri, an area that covers both rural and urban regions, and it reaches patients in Kentucky, Arkansas, and Iowa as well.

Formally established in 2014 with the advent of the NCI Community Oncology Research Program, Heartland NCORP is a merger of three earlier networks that conducted trials as part of the NCI’s former Community Clinical Oncology Program (CCOP): the Heartland CCOP of St. Louis, the Central Illinois CCOP based in Decatur, and the Illinois CancerCare CCOP of Peoria.

Dr. Bryan A. Faller, MD, based at Missouri Baptist Medical Center in St. Louis, has served as principal investigator for Heartland NCORP for the past decade.

Peggy Wisher, RN, BSN, at Decatur Memorial Hospital, has been lead oncology research professional with Heartland NCORP from its inception (and had served as head CRA of its Central Illinois CCOP predecessor). She now shares NCORP management duties with Jen Dill, BS, at Missouri Baptist Medical Center, and Chetaye Knox, BS, CCRP, at Illinois CancerCare.

Together, Faller, Wisher, Dill, and Knox lead NCORP participation for a team of almost 300 physicians and other research professionals (a team that includes the study chair of SWOG’s S1501, Dr. Justin Floyd, DO).

At the team’s core is a shared commitment to community-based research which, as stated on the Heartland website, lets patients “stay close to family, friends, support systems, and their local physician and health organizations, where high quality clinical studies are resulting in better care.”

To say this NCORP is among SWOG’s top accruing member institutions is something of an understatement. At every SWOG group meeting over the last five years, Heartland has made our list of top-accruing NCORPs, often perched at the very top of the rankings. Cumulatively, it has now registered more than 4,000 participants to SWOG-led clinical trials.

It has been a particularly prodigious enroller to some of our NCORP Research Base trials – for example, registering almost 300 patients to S2013 I-CHECKIT (SWOG’s observational study to develop a risk prediction model for immune-related adverse events). But Heartland has also enrolled more than 150 patients to Lung-MAP, evidence of its commitment to advancing biomarker-driven research.

In fact, Dr. Faller has presented at Lung-MAP webinars on the lessons he’s learned in how to conduct and enroll to a biomarker-driven umbrella trial in a community-based network of sites. Talks on some of the latest findings related to community-based clinical research are also a key component of an annual research meeting Heartland holds for its investigators and other professional staff (Dr. Hershman has been honored to present at one such meeting!).

Clearly Heartland NCORP adopted its name to reflect its geographic home in the nation’s heartland, and its website states that it’s “at the heart of tomorrow’s cancer care.” 

It’s also very much at the heart of SWOG’s research endeavor.