The history and future of the Urologic Oncology Study Group (UOSG) of the Japan Clinical Oncology Group (JCOG)

摘要

The Urologic Oncology Study Group (UOSG) of the Japan Clinical Oncology Group was founded in 2001. At the beginning, 41 collaborative institutions participated, and the first group representative was Kenichi Tobisu, from the Shizuoka Cancer Center. In the last 10 years, three JCOG studies have been conducted. In two of them, patient registration has been closed and they are now in the follow-up period. The third study has just started registration in 2011. At present, we have not yet completed the final data analyses in any of the studies. In the meantime, however, we have performed a few retrospective analyses by collecting clinical data from each of the participating institutions, and the results were published as important Japanese data. All the activities of the investigation were supported by the Health and Labor Sciences Research Grants for Clinical Research in Japan. The UOSG encountered great difficulties in planning the prospective study, completing the sophisticated protocol and recruiting the expected number of patients. It usually took a longer time than expected to achieve the final goal. This was probably due to insufficient experience in conducting sophisticated protocol studies and immaturity in managing a study group. Now, the UOSG consists of 38 institutions and is gradually overcoming these problems. In 2011, the UOSG changed its group representative to Yoshiyuki Kakehi from Kagawa University and continues to strive to meet the challenge of becoming a more active group. In this review, we provide an overview of the history and achievements of the UOSG over the past 10 years, along with a list of participating institutions.