Memorial Sloan Kettering's vision is nothing less than to revolutionize the treatment of cancer. Our goal over the next decade is to integrate molecular and clinical information to develop therapies that home in on the abnormalities driving each patient's disease. At MSK, this new era in precision cancer medicine is already a reality for many of our patients
Capitalizing on our exceptionally powerful combination of clinical and scientific resources, we are delivering on the promise of personalized cancer therapy and are setting the stage for transformational change, both in the immediate future and for years to come. At MSK, we’ve created new ways to facilitate more discoveries, even more rapidly and have put in place creative new approaches to sharing. We’re reaching within our own walls and beyond them to move what we know about cancer research, treatment, and care delivery into an ever-expanding universe of patients, fellow clinicians, and scientists. MSK investigators working in a variety of areas collaborate with one another as well as with scientists and clinicians from other academic and research institutions around the nation. Teaming with other organizations allows us to make the most of our expertise in cancer research and related topics while gaining valuable insight from researchers who are focused on the same overarching goals — exploring new ways to cure, control, and prevent disease. Among our ongoing extramural collaborations are the New York State Stem Cell Science Consortia, the Starr Cancer Consortium, the Tri-Institutional Stem Cell Initiative, the Tri-Institutional Therapeutics Discovery Institute, and the Physical Sciences-Oncology Center. In addition, in 2012, the leadership of MSK endorsed a $2. 2 billion investment in a clinical expansion that is setting the stage for a changing care paradigm into the next decade and beyond. There are several tangible components of our clinical strategic plan, among them an outpatient cancer building, the David H. Koch Center for Cancer Care. This new center scheduled to open in 2019 will enable us to provide cancer care in a facility designed to adapt to the ways in which cancer will be diagnosed and treated in the coming decades. We will provide leading-edge treatment for patients with hematologic cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma, head and neck cancers, and thoracic cancers. The facility will also support our efforts to offer bone marrow transplants in the outpatient setting and a focused environment for early-stage clinical trials. Other elements of the capital program include the Josie Robertson Surgical Center on York Avenue (scheduled to open in 2016), which will feature 12 operating rooms equipped to provide technologically sophisticated surgical care on an outpatient basis. MSK is also planning a new facility that will house a clinical laboratory and research building and will accommodate all specialized testing, along with a cell bank, a cell therapy facility, and tumor procurement services. New regional facilities in West Harrison, New York, and Monmouth County, New Jersey (slated to open in 2016), have joined our growing network of suburban campuses in Westchester County, on Long Island, and in New Jersey, all of which offer a convenient point of access for patients seeking MSK's quality of care.
With nearly 1,000 attending physicians and 140 senior laboratory investigators, we maintain one of the world’s most dynamic programs of cancer research. More than 120 research laboratories are focused on better understanding every form of the disease and 35 state-of-the-art core facilities provide our research community with the latest research technology and a range of expert services. Research at the Sloan Kettering Institute (SKI), MSK’S basic research arm, is dedicated to understanding the biology of cancer through nine major research programs. Investigators at SKI collaborate with Memorial Hospital physician-scientists — a partnership that helps speed important research findings from the laboratory to the patient. Memorial Hospital’s extensive research program includes areas that focus on basic laboratory research, translational research that bridges discoveries made in the laboratory and those made in the clinic, and mathematical and computational research directed at analyzing and interpreting biomedical data. MSK also conducts one of the largest clinical research programs in the world. Through these studies, physicians and scientists on our disease-focused research teams translate basic science findings into new treatment advances. In addition, MSK actively initiates and participates in clinical trials to identify more-effective cancer therapies. The world-class patient care we provide benefits from all these innovative programs in basic, clinical, and translational research. In fact, between 1980 and 2012, the U. S. Food and Drug Administration approved nine drugs developed in our labs for marketing — a success rate unmatched by any other cancer center. In addition, we have an array of collaborative centers within the institution that draw on the breadth of our scientific expertise, bringing together laboratory investigators and clinicians from a range of disciplines to focus on strategically important areas of cancer research. These centers include the Center for Cell Engineering, the Center for Epigenetics Research, the Center for Experimental Therapeutics, the Center for Metastasis Research, the Center for Molecular Imaging and Nanotechnology, the Center for Stem Cell Biology, the Center of Comparative Medicine and Pathology, the David M. Rubenstein Center for Pancreatic Cancer Research, the Fiona and Stanley Druckenmiller Center for Lung Cancer Research, the Geoffrey Beene Cancer Research Center, the Lucille Castori Center for Microbes, Inflammation and Cancer, the Ludwig Center for Cancer Immunotherapy, and the Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Center for Molecular Oncology.
Our scientists and clinicians work relentlessly to answer critical questions about cancer and make seminal contributions to the development of new and innovative therapies that are improving the lives of the patients we see today and those we will care for tomorrow. Pinpointing the genetic changes that cause cancer has been a special focus of researchers here at MSK and elsewhere for more than a decade. MSK has extensive experience in this area and has developed a pioneering test — called MSK-IMPACT™ — that can reliably and accurately screen for mutations in more than 400 genes. Today, when a patient leaves MSK after a biopsy, their tumor sample takes a different path. It travels to an MSK laboratory where it is tested for these genetic mutations. The results help our doctors determine which drug or drug combination may work best for each patient, based on their genetic profile rather than where the tumor originated. Genetic screening will become even more routine and our researchers will gain access to even more data; as they do, they will work to refine old targets and find new ones, in order to get therapies to more patients, even faster. We have already made tremendous strides in cancer research and treatment at MSK. Many of the approaches developed or pioneered here have become the standard of care worldwide. We will know we are making even more progress as our investigators reveal more about the biological underpinnings of cancer and as the numbers of cancer survivors continue to rise, both nationally and internationally
Our overarching goal is to improve patient outcomes and to extend our expertise to as many patients as possible. Our vision is to develop and bring treatments to patients that were not available before — indeed, that did not exist before. MSK investigators and clinicians have made cancer treatment not only more effective but significantly more tolerable for patients receiving these treatments. Targeted therapies, many of which were developed by MSK researchers, generally come with fewer side effects than conventional systemic chemotherapies. Radiation techniques — many of which were also pioneered at MSK — allow radiation to be delivered more precisely and in higher doses than ever before, killing cancer cells while sparing nearby healthy tissue. Cancer surgery is growing less invasive and increasingly operations can now be done by our expert surgeons on an outpatient basis, allowing patients to return home the same day. However, challenges remain. There is still much to learn about cancer: How it develops, how it grows and spreads, and how to prevent the disease in the first place. And Memorial Sloan Kettering is in a unique position to do the bold, innovative, and multidisciplinary research required and to rapidly apply our findings to the clinical setting. We are excited about the future and are enormously optimistic that recent advances — and advances to come — will expand the benefits of personalized therapy to all patients with cancer.
