Tomorrow's Cancer Treatments Today: The First 50 Years of the Cancer and Leukemia Group B

Members of the Cancer and Leukemia Group B (CALGB) have been striving to improve cancer therapies for more than 50 years. The organization began in the mid 1950s as a multi-institutional collaboration between investigators at the National Cancer Institute, Roswell Park Memorial Institute, and the Children's Hospital in Buffalo New York. In 1956 the group was officially designated as the Acute Leukemia Group B (ALGB) and for most of its first decade focused largely on leukemia research. Reflecting an expansion of its research portfolio during the 1960s and 70s, the name was changed in 1976 to Cancer and Leukemia Group B. Currently, the organization has hundreds of members, including nurses, clinical research associates, statisticians, physicians, translational scientists, and an administrative staff from a nationwide network of academic and community based organizations and medical practices. Disease areas within the scope of CALGB research include hematologic malignancies, as well as breast, gastrointestinal, genitourinary, and respiratory cancers. Modality expertise includes quality of life, medical oncology, surgery, radiation oncology, pathology, imaging, oncology nursing, health outcomes, geriatrics, biostatistics, data management, and an extensive array of correlative sciences. Some of the major accomplishments of CALGB investigators and the patients participating in CALGB research as critical and committed partners will be reviewed here.