Dr. Choueiri on the Significance of the CCC19 During the COVID-19 Crisis

Toni K. Choueiri, MD, director of the Lank Center for Genitourinary Oncology, director of the Kidney Cancer Center, and senior physician at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, as well as the Jerome and Nancy Kohlberg chair and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, discusses the significance of the COVID-19 and Cancer Consortium (CCC19) during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic.

The CCC19 was the product of a group of investigators who met online through social media at the beginning of the pandemic, says Choueiri. They started collecting clinical data and outcomes on patients with cancer who were infected with the virus. Over 100 sites are entering information regarding mortality, intensive care unit admission, and other data with several variables on each patient's diagnosis, management, and mortality, explains Choueiri. The coordinating center is at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, with Jeremy L. Warner, MD, MS, with several other oncologists on the steering committee.

A couple of interesting observations were presented during the 2020 ASCO Virtual Scientific Program, published in the Lancet and, most recently, in Cancer Discovery. Investigators are trying to identify patterns of risk factors for patients with cancer. For example, a patient with cancer who is receiving and progressing on therapy who is also infected with COVID-19 has a worse 30-day mortality; sometimes efforts are counterintuitive, says Choueiri.

CCC19 is an important database that has thousands of patients' data included and as the pandemic continues, more data will emerge from CCC19, concludes Choueiri.