Findings from the Adjuvant Colon Cancer End Points (ACCENT) Collaborative Group: the power of pooled individual patient data from multiple clinical trials

The Adjuvant Colon Cancer End Points (ACCENT) Collaborative Group was formed 15 years ago to address scientific questions in early stage colon cancer that could best be answered by pooling individual patient data across many randomized clinical trials. Today, the ACCENT database contains detailed information collected from over 40,000 patients enrolled onto 27 major adjuvant colon cancer trials conducted between 1977 and 2009. Since its inception, the ACCENT group has led many sophisticated analyses addressing a variety of clinical questions, such as the long-term survivorship of colon cancer patients by treatment, the time course of oxaliplatin benefit, and support for the use of disease-free survival (DFS) as a surrogate endpoint for overall survival (OS), among many others. Here, we provide an updated overview of recent important results and future directions of the ACCENT collaboration.