Since its inception, the Transplant, Leukemia and Cellular Therapy Program at Northside Hospital has prioritized twin goals: delivering excellent patient care and driving advanced clinical research that changes lives.
What makes our program truly unique is that, unlike many hospital-based research programs, Northside Hospital Cancer Institute is not part of a traditional medical school or academic medical center. Yet, we have conducted an extraordinarily large number of prospective clinical trials using novel anticancer agents and approaches to transplantation.
This includes opening 311 total clinical trials, resulting in 1,630 total patients enrolled in new treatment clinical trials to date. Among these, 40 clinical trials of new cancer treatments have been used for the very first time to benefit patients. This has allowed patients undergoing treatment at Northside to access the very latest anticancer technologies and therapies before they become available to the general public through Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval.
The availability of novel treatments is at least partly responsible for the unparalleled outcomes achieved by Northside in bone marrow and blood stem cell transplantation. Specifically, using a national assessment of survival following donor-based (allogeneic) transplantation, Northside has achieved outcomes that have been significantly better than expected for 16 consecutive years. No other transplant program in the nation has achieved such superior outcomes for an unbroken period of this length. Northside is also the only transplant program in Georgia to achieve survival outcomes significantly better than expected in the last assessment period.
Another remarkable feature of the cancer research conducted by Northside is that more than 40 research trials were initiated, planned and developed within Northside (investigator-initiated trials). Typically, such trials are developed only within traditional medical schools or academic medical centers, and their initiation outside those settings is very unusual. The development of so many IITs testifies to Northside Hospital Cancer Institute’s commitment to making the latest approaches to cancer therapy available to our patients, thereby improving their outcomes and quality of life.
Part of this commitment is a dedicated research program that includes research nurses, research coordinators, data specialists and a supervising manager. This team ensures local management and nimble turnaround times to rapidly open new clinical trial protocols and clear obstacles to their development and conduct.
Northside has offered CART T-cell therapy since 2017. The availability of this robust program has revolutionized the treatment of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and multiple myeloma and is rapidly being expanded to other cancers and noncancer diseases.
Northside Hospital Cancer Institute’s Cancer Research Program will continue to expand as novel cellular therapies are developed for conditions as diverse as melanoma and autoimmune diseases such as systemic lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.
FIND CANCER RESEARCH AND CLINICAL TRIALS AT NORTHSIDE.
