Cancer Clinical Trials Pooling of Quality Life Data (CATAPULT) initiative

Patient-centered care is a critical component in quality health care and patient-reported health-related quality of life (HRQoL) is one of the best ways to capture patient-centeredness. The utility of the patient perspective and HRQol can enable the investigation of significant but neglected topics relating to HRQoL in various areas of clinical cancer trials research. Patient-Reported Outcomes and Behavioral Evidence (PROBE) was a project spearheaded by the EORTC to respond to this need.

Although the insights gained from PROBE have been pivotal in moving the research on HRQoL forward, there are still some remaining issues, which should be addressed. The CATAPULT project aims to investigate if:

• Baseline or change in HRQoL adds prognostic value beyond clinical measures and therefore improves prognostic accuracy in cancer RCTs
• HRQoL domains form three factors (physical, psychological and gastrointestinal) which are interrelated
• The different HRQoL domains form one factor and yield a single, valid summary score.

One major limitation of PROBE was that most of the data was from the EORTC and the Canadian Cancer Trials Group (CCTG) closed clinical trials, and were limited to specific disease sites. The CATAPULT project presents an opportunity to:

1. Include data from other institutions and different cancer sites
2. Validate the findings from PROBE to make results more generalizable and
3. Address new arising questions that were not addressed in PROBE.

The CATAPULT project will build on PROBE, which has been proven to be scientifically fruitful in providing a greater understanding of psychosocial issues in improvement of care, services and practice.

See list of publications below.

Prognostic change score publication is being drafted.

Circulate first draft manuscript by end of April 2026

The CATAPULT initiative aims to assemble a database of patient-reported health-related quality of life (HRQoL) data from closed cancer randomized clinical trials (RCTs). Data will be gathered from institutions and across different disease sites/ disease stage.

The project promotes the efficient use of existing clinical trials data to carry out research that will help provide a better understanding of HRQoL of cancer patients in RCTs. Results from this project will be fruitful in providing a greater understanding of psychosocial issues in improvement of care, services and practice, and will also be helpful for educating clinicians, healthcare providers and policy makers.