Clinical trials involve evaluating and validating new therapies in humans and represent the fundamental means of making progress in cancer care. The oncology community has made significant improvements in treating most cancers and, in some cases, has developed cures, such as for testicular cancer, Hodgkin disease, and acute lymphocytic leukemia. In an even larger number of cancers, researchers and clinicians have succeeded in making cancer a chronic disease that people die with rather than of. Each of these therapeutic discoveries represents the results of clinical trials.Many of these advances were made possible in large part through the Clinical Trials Program at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). This program began in 1955, 1 and since then has changed substantially in its approach to the design, coordination, and implementation of clinical trials. The past 10 years, in particular, have seen a transformational reworking of the NCI's clinical trials infrastructure. 2 The NCI National Clinical Trials Network (NCTN) now includes more than 3000 study sites across the United States and Canada and each year enrolls more than 20 000 children and adults with all types of cancer in clinical trials. 3 The NCTN portfolio includes studies across the cancer research continuum, from first-in-human trials of new agents, to evaluations of new diagnostic and therapeutic techniques, to trials evaluating cancer prevention and symptom management. The infrastructure provides a broad range of support services, including centralized institutional review boards; clinical trials monitoring, data acquisition, and management systems; tissue banks; and quality-control centers for imaging and radiation therapy.