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U.S. National Institutes of Health
Cancer Diagnosis Program Cancer Imaging Program Cancer Therapy Evaluation Program Developmental Therapeutics Program Radiation Research Program Translational Research Program Biometric Research Branch Office of Cancer Complementary and Alternative Medicine
Last Updated: 04/25/2012

About the Associate Director

CTEP AD

Jeffrey S. Abrams, M.D., has led the Cancer Therapy Evaluation Program (CTEP) since June 2007.  Dr. Abrams came to CTEP in 1993 when he joined as a clinical research scientist to oversee the breast cancer treatment trials portfolio and participate in clinical trials at the NIH Clinical Center and the National Naval Medical Center. More…

INTRODUCTION

The death rate from all cancers combined has been decreasing in the United States since the early 1990s. This milestone has been achieved, in part, because therapeutic and preventive interventions to fight cancer are working. One key to the success of these interventions is that they are tested rigorously before being disseminated broadly. Clinical trials are the mechanism for testing new approaches for cancer prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. More than 800 treatment trials are sponsored by the Cancer Therapy Evaluation Program (CTEP) within the NCI Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis (DCTD).

CTEP is organized into one office and seven branches:

  • Office of the Associate Director
  • Clinical Grants and Contracts Branch
  • Clinical Investigations Branch
  • Clinical Trials Monitoring Branch
  • Clinical Trials Operations and Informatics Branch
  • Investigational Drug Branch
  • Pharmaceutical Management Branch
  • Regulatory Affairs Branch

CTEP houses NCI’s primary program for evaluating new anticancer treatments. It also provides and tracks experimental agents for clinical trials run by other NCI components. During 2010, CTEP:

  • Managed 862 active clinical trials
  • Supervised 96 active Investigational New Drugs (INDs)
  • Oversaw the recruitment of more than 41,000 patients to CTEP-sponsored clinical trials

Once CTEP identifies promising agents for evaluation, it must also work with investigators to develop and qualify biomolecular assays that can measure important tumor targets to assure that therapies are selected for the appropriate tumor types. This goal is achieved by close interactions with other DCTD programs including the NCI Experimental Therapeutics Program (NExT), the Developmental Therapeutics Program (DTP), the Cancer Diagnosis Program (CDP), the Cancer Imaging Program (CIP), and the Radiation Research Program (RRP). In addition to these internal partnerships, the program fosters collaborations more broadly across the cancer research community and works extensively with the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. CTEP also reaches out to patients and advocates to help establish research priorities.