Philosophy Regarding Partnerships
To further our mission, POI partners with private sponsors, government agencies, international collaborators, and private donors. These funding sources have allowed us to continue our humanitarian work and answer important research questions
At Preventive Oncology International, we believe that collaboration with public and private sectors will provide the greatest opportunity to further our mission to gain an understanding of cancer prevention and early detection while providing needed medical care in underserved areas of the developing world. Although providing care is an important part of our model, we believe that until we have discovered effective, low cost screening and early detection technologies that can be applied in low resource settings, we will not succeed in making a sustainable impact on the burden of cancer worldwide.
Since its inception, POI has successfully designed and initiated all of the primary POI clinical trials and partnered with a number of organizations and corporations to study technologies involved in the early detection of cervical cancer. These collaborations have provided corporations with the opportunity to trial their product or technology in well designed, IRB approved, cost-effective international settings. At the same time, principal investigators from POI design studies to answer their own research questions that will provide further knowledge of the disease, screening or early detection, barriers to obtaining care, acceptability of devices and a host of other important issues. Finally, the human subjects involved in the trials gain the benefit of participation in a screening or early detection program that, in most cases, would not have been available to them in their current situations. It is hoped that the knowledge gained will lead to acceptable and affordable solutions for the people in their communities and underserved areas around the world.
Our past and current collaborations with researchers from the National Institutes of Health and the private sector are also critical to our mission. Government funding and private donations have played an important role in allowing Dr. Belinson and the researchers of POI to incorporate their research questions into existing studies and build networks of sponsors and researchers that will create future collaborations toward the mission of the organization.
At POI, we believe in creating a network of public and private partners that come together to discover screening and early detection technologies for cancer. We maximize the power of the dollars dedicated to the project to ensure that the involved parties achieve their goals on time, on budget and in the context of a well designed study that produces sound scientific results. Our past successes have regularly produced publications in respected international peer-reviewed journals and presentations at world wide scientific meetings.
Our research is always conducted using strict ethical research principles. Our projects are approved by the Cleveland Clinic IRB as well as the local or regional IRB/ethics committee in the countries where we work. Our data entry processes are rigorous, and data is sent directly to the POI International Center for Epidemiology and Biostatistics in Chicago. Neither the principal investigator nor the corporate sponsor/donor has access to the data base, other than to oversee the data entry process. Research agreements specify that investigators will freely publish data regardless of the outcome.