Center for Optimization of Participant Engagement for Cancer Characterization (COPECC)

Building a foundation for access to health care innovation for Hispanic/Latino cancer patients

University of Southern California

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the second leading cause of cancer mortality in the United States. Hispanic/Latino/a(x) (H/L) CRC patients tend to be diagnosed at a younger age and with higher stage, and it has also been reported that Mexican H/L in California have a higher proportion of young (<50 years of age) diagnoses compared to other H/L subgroups. Moreover, significant gaps persist in the availability of molecular profiling data from cancer patient cohorts, including significant limitations in data from H/L cancer cases. A barrier to biomedical research studies is the lack of culturally appropriate approaches to engaging and involving communities for participation in research.

To address these challenges and to identify solutions to these issues, we have created the Center for Optimization of Participant Engagement for Cancer Characterization (COPECC) at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. The overarching goal of COPECC is to build a foundation for access to health care innovation for H/L cancer patients. Our center will perform among the largest and most comprehensive studies to characterize the molecular features of CRC in H/L, particularly those with early onset cancer. These data will help the scientific community best understand the mechanisms driving CRC in our H/L population. Importantly, we will concurrently develop and optimize culturally tailored methods to best engage our H/L patient population towards developing optimized models that can be distributed broadly to advance biomedical research studies.