[Current issues and perspectives in Japan Clinical Oncology Group]

Clinical trials can be classified either as "sponsored trials (sponsored by industries)" or "non-sponsored trials (funded by government etc.)". The former is for the application of the commercialization/import of new drugs by the government, and the latter basically seeks to establish and improve the "State of the Art" of medical treatments/prevention in certain disease fields. We present an overview of the Japan Clinical Oncology Group (JCOG), which is a cooperative group funded by government for conducting non-sponsored cancer clinical trials, and the fundamental procedures managed by our JCOG Data Center. The problems and difficulties concerning data management in our trials, our roles and limitations as a non-commercial data coordinating center, future perspectives and issues on local data management are also discussed.