A primary goal of the Coordinating Center is promotion of information access, information exchange, interaction, and collaboration among members of the SCLC Consortium. To these ends, the Coordinating Center provides administrative oversight for the group of investigators researching SCLC, including coordination of regular teleconferences and assistance in planning an annual face-to-face meeting. These activities will promote the coherence of the group, and stimulate collaboration among the investigators.

Administrative oversight and communications

Memorial Sloan Kettering continues to provide general administrative oversight including serving as primary point of contact for NCI (Dr. Rudin). All four PIs of this Coordinating Center have extensive academic leadership experience and will be directly involved in any substantive decisions regarding center management and expenditures. We maintain an updated list of investigators involved in Consortium research including NCI contacts, support staff, lab leaders within the Consortium, and laboratory members at all levels of training who have expressed interest and whose membership is supported by their PI. This includes a dynamic email distribution list with over 350 members, for programmatic announcements and activity coordination.

Work-in-progress seminar series

We will maintain a biweekly video seminar series among participants of the Consortium that has been among the most popular aspects of the Coordinating Center. The attendance to this exceptionally interactive meeting typically tops 100 active investigators representing 20 or more academic centers, patient advocates, and NCI program staff. Ongoing work by one or two laboratories is highlighted each meeting, with a strong emphasis of unpublished work-in-progress rather than polished stories. Participants are explicitly encouraged to provide advice and input into projects and share resources with colleagues, without co-opting novel ideas presented in this open forum. Presentations by graduate students and post-doctoral researchers are particularly strongly encouraged, and the active participants include such pre- and post-doctoral trainees from multiple institutions. We have also used this seminar series for periodic invited presentations by investigators working on related areas that may inform research directions in SCLC.

We also use these regularly scheduled calls for updates from NCI representatives and program officers regarding new program announcements, upcoming initiatives, newly funded labs within the Consortium, and any other shared resources and opportunities of relevance to the group.

Annual meetings

With support from the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC), the International Small Cell Lung Cancer Meeting was created in 2015 and has become a biennial event hosted at MSK every other year since then. The conference is focused on preclinical and clinical advances in small cell lung cancer research including basic research on oncogenesis and biology of disease, preclinical therapeutic research, and highlights of ongoing clinical translation. The event has grown exponentially, and the 2023 event welcomed the maximum possible 250 registered scientists, heard from 40+ speakers, received dozens of abstracts for a poster session, highlighted 2 keynote speakers, and networked with Industry Sponsors over 3 packed days.

Alternating with the international meeting, the Coordinating Center has worked with NCI and grant Program Officers to plan smaller focused meetings of SCLC Investigators to share updates on the federally funded SCLC U01 and R01 awards, exchange resources and information and plan future collaborative projects.

Website

The Coordinating Center has developed and maintains a website for the SCLC Consortium, including a general description of the Consortium, the Specific Aims of the Coordinating Center, membership of the Consortium with live links to participating investigators and/or labs, publicly available information on NCI supported Research Projects, a link to the SCLC Consortium cBioPortal platform, and information on prior and upcoming research meetings.