SPeCTr News:
We received our cycle three score and reviewer feedback. Although the score wasn't what we hoped, there were positive notes from the reviewers, and we had the opportunity to provide a 3-page response to their comments. We anticipate hearing about next cycle funding awards early next year.
We were able to send 6 team members to our fall meeting in Washington, DC in November -- Drs. Ann Davis, Bridgette Jones, Brenda Salley and Marissa Love as well as Wichita coordinator Sarah Krogman and myself. Five of us were involved in one aspect of the agenda or another presenting or panel discussant, etc.
We continue to be involved in all aspects of network operations from writing groups for manuscripts to working groups thinking of new clinical trial ideas to protocol development and planning our network steering committee meetings. We have several manuscripts in various stages of preparation and submission and have submitted an abstract to PAS for potential poster or presentation next spring at the meeting in Hawaii. Stay tuned for updates on these and all things.
Network News:
DCOC Leadership Additions:
The Data Coordinating and Operations Center (DCOC) announced that Sherry E. Courtney, MD, MS, and Fred Prior, PHD have joined the DCOC leadership team at University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) as Managing Principal Investigators (MPIs) of the DCOC. Both have joined Song Ounpraseuth, PhD who serves in the role of Principal Investigator (PI).
Dr. Courtney is a neonatologist at Arkansas Children’s Hospital and a Professor for the Department of Pediatrics, Neonatology section at UAMS. With nearly 40 years of clinical research experience in neonatology, Dr. Courtney has a MS in Clinical Research Design and Statistical Analysis and has been a site PI as well as PI on multiple clinical trials funded by NIH and industry. As Director of Clinical Research for the UAMS/ACH Section of Neonatology for twelve years, her focus has been on respiratory care of newborns.
Dr. Prior is Professor and Chair of the UAMS Department of Biomedical Informatics, Chief of the Division of Child Health Biomedical Informatics and Interim Director of Biomedical Research Informatics at the Arkansas Children’s Research Institute. He directs the activities of the DCOC Informatics Team and as a member of the Quality Council reviews and resolves issues that arise. Dr. Prior drafts and approves SOPs related to informatics and evaluates EDC and CTMS software packages.
Dr. Prior’s research interests include cancer informatics, clinical trial data management, data publishing and neuroimaging informatics. He serves as principal investigator and director of the US National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Imaging Archive Project and is a work package lead in an EU funded consortium to develop distributed data management and machine learning for cancer imaging. Dr. Prior also directs informatics efforts for the UAMS Translational Research Institute (TRI) and its Comprehensive Informatics Resource Core.
