Dr Randall on the Multidisciplinary Foundation of Research Into Sarcoma Survivorship

"[This work] was funded in such a competitive environment, especially when you're dealing with socioeconomic disparities in the current climate of our society, because it was multidisciplinary."

R. Lor Randall, MD, FACS, the David Linn Endowed Chair for Orthopedic Surgery, chair of the Department of Orthopedic Surgery, and a professor at UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center, spotlighted the multidisciplinary nature of a prospective study evaluating disparities in survivorship care in pediatric sarcoma, and how this helped study investigators secure funding in a highly competitive research environment.

Elysia Marie Alvarez, MD, MPH, Randall's colleague at UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center, was recently awarded a grant from the National Cancer Institute to investigate differences in outcomes among sarcoma survivors after receiving similar therapies. The research aims to predict and prevent differences among patients who received guideline-concordant care vs those who did not, Randall explained.

The multidisciplinary nature of Alvarez’s project, which is based upon peer-reviewed and published data, was critical for securing competitive funding from the National Institutes of Health, Randall stated. The research team integrates molecular biology, transcriptomics, biostatistics, and informatics, moving beyond historical survivorship assessments focused only on socioeconomic and cultural variables, he detailed. Key collaborators include internationally recognized medical oncologist William D. Tapp, MD, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Randall himself.

The overarching goal of this research is to establish a comprehensive precision framework for survivorship by uniting molecular profiling, population-level analytics, and Health Equity frameworks, Randall said. This approach could enable investigators to personalize long-term follow-up care, ensuring that high-risk patients receive targeted, specialized interventions to ensure proper survivorship outcomes are achieved, he concluded.