Clinical Trials

Throughout the last 30 years, the survival rate for children affected by cancer has dramatically improved. A number of factors have contributed to this remarkable success story, including the availability of new, more effective drugs and treatment regimens, the emergence of promising new techniques such as bone marrow transplantation, and improvements in supportive care measures, including antibiotics and transfusion support.

However, the single biggest reason for success in the battle against childhood cancer has been the long-standing and widespread participation of childhood cancer patients in clinical trials. A clinical trial is a treatment protocol which combines state-of-the-art treatment with clinical, or patient-oriented, research.

Clinical trials are the means by which new treatments are evaluated to determine if they are better than currently available treatments. Studies have demonstrated that childhood cancer patients participating in clinical trials have, in general, better outcomes than patients who do not participate in such studies.

Phoenix Children's, recognizing the importance of clinical trials in identifying more effective treatments for children with oncologic diseases, participates in national and international clinical trials for children. Increasing the number of children participating in well-designed clinical trials will lead to more rigorous and more rapid evaluation of promising new treatments.

In addition to its involvement with COG, Phoenix Children's also helped form the Arizona Children's Therapeutic and Investigational Oncology Network (ACTION) consortium with its colleagues in pediatric oncology at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

ACTION provides the best, most up-to-date treatments for children with cancer while also identifying and evaluating promising new agents. ACTION is affiliated with the Arizona Cancer Center and is a member of the newly formed Pediatric Oncology Experimental Therapeutic Investigator Consortium (POETIC), a group of major pediatric oncology centers devoted to designing and conducting early clinical trials of promising new therapies with an emphasis on translating basic science into clinical treatments for children.

Phoenix Children's is also a member of the Children's Neuro-Oncology Consortium as well as the Pediatric Bone Marrow Transplant Consortium.

Utilizing these vast resources, our mission at Phoenix Children's is to give the children of Arizona the most promising treatments currently available for their disease while developing innovative and more effective ways of curing children with cancer in the future.

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(602) 546-0920