The Global Genitourinary Group is a multidisciplinary, collaborative group of dedicated health care professionals who have leadership positions in co-operative clinical trials groups and are committed to conducting large scale clinical trials in Genitourinary Cancer. The group will initiate, implement, and facilitate high quality intergroup clinical trials in genitourinary oncology. The group will accomplish this by establishing and maintaining active communication and collaboration between the leaders of the cooperative clinical trials groups around the world. The group will also encourage the development of translational research studies. This process will provide an opportunity for the early identification, support, and collaborative planning of trials that are candidates for intergroup participation, and reduce duplication of effort between groups.

Letter from the Chairman

In an effort to combine forces against genito-urinary tract cancer, communicate with other Groups and streamline clinical research, the GU Global Group was founded in 1986 by David Crawford from SWOG. The founding team consisted of George Wilding from ECOG, Bill Shipley from RTOG, Mary Gospadorowicz representing NCIC and Richard Sylvester from the EORTC GU Group. Their goal was to have a long rangeplan and to do what cooperative groups should do, and that is to cooperate with each other to better serve clinical research. This worked very well, particularly in the United States and Canada.David Crawford served as the Chairman from 1986 until 1998 when Laurie Klotz took over. He served as Chairman for two terms while Richard Sylvester was the Secretary. I was elected as the new Chairman in 2006 and Fred Saad as the Secretary/Treasurer.The GU Global Group is a multidisciplinary group of chairpersons or representatives of co-operative Clinical Trials Groups from all around the world. These dedicated healthcare professionals are leaders in their fields and are running large scale clinical trials in genito-urinary cancer. The aim of the group is to facilitate, initiate and implement high quality intergroup clinical studies. The ideas are discussed from the very beginning and the opportunities to unite forces in order to answer some very important questions in urological cancer.
Alison Martin, the Head in GU cancer at CTEP, NCI is one of the key figures in harmonizing intergroup studies and working really hard to overcome obstacles in truly international intergroup trials. This has also worked very good in the past in succeeding to finalise some large-scale intergroup trials in urologic cancer which changed clinical practice.There is a lot that can be done to join efforts in our fight against urologic cancer. In an era with many emerging new treatment modalities, investigator initiated scientific clinical research is the only way to move forward in order to serve better to our patients.

Chairman Ziya Kirkali, MD Dokuz Eylul University School of Medicine Department of Urology Izmir, Turkey 35340 Fax: 90 232 464 7372
Secretary Fred Saad, MD, FRCS University of Montreal Department of Surgery / Urology 1560 Sherbrooke East Montreal, Quebec H2L 4M1 Fax: 1 514 412 7620

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M.McCormack, MD, FRCS (c)