The National Cancer Institute awarded $43.7 million to USC’s Keck School of Medicine and Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center to continue tracking incidences of cancer in Los Angeles County, the university announced Monday.
Called the Los Angeles Cancer Surveillance Program, the registry dates back nearly half a century, and program managers say the effort has improved the understanding, prevention and control of cancer, which is among the leading causes of death worldwide.
“We are the first line of defense. We identify cancer trends and pave roads that lead to better cancer prevention and treatment,” said Dr. Dennis Deapen, director of the surveillance program and a professor of clinical preventive medicine at Keck. “Without people like us collecting cancer data from a large, diverse population, cancer research primarily would be based on old, white men. That isn’t very useful for other ethnic and age groups because they have different genetic and environmental risk factors.”
The $43.7 million from the NCI’s Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results Program will be spread over 10 years and support cancer data collection.
Nationwide, there are only 19 such registries that provide the federal government with ongoing surveillance of cancer incidence and survival rates in the United States. The Cancer Surveillance Program, managed by Keck and the Norris Center, is one of the largest and arguably the most comprehensive cancer registry in the country, officials said. It contains more than 1.7 million cancer incidence cases and collects some 44,160 records annually.
Founded in 1970, the Cancer Surveillance Program is unique in that it surveys one of the most diverse counties in the nation. Los Angeles County has a population large enough to enable identification of significant trends even when data are segmented into ethnic, socio-economic, age and other subgroups, according to the university.
Los Angeles County has 10,163,507 people — 26 percent of California’s population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. While there are counties in the United States that are slightly more diverse, some of their populations are not large enough to draw significant findings when broken into subgroups, according to USC.
“Our registry contributes to the expansion of data that supports precision medicine or personalized medicine,” Deapen said. “We are identifying the risk level, survival chance or effectiveness of cancer control programs and efforts for specific groups of people.”
More than 6,000 international scientific studies have used data from the Cancer Surveillance Program, suggesting its expansive reach when it comes to defining demographic patterns and risk factors for specific cancers, the university said.
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