David Scheinberg has led the Experimental Therapeutics Center since its establishment. He has developed several new cancer therapies that have been brought to clinical trials.
The Experimental Therapeutics Center was organized to advance new therapies from the laboratory to the clinical setting. To accomplish this, the Center assembles a diverse group of physicians and scientists from within Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and supports their basic science and clinical research. It includes laboratory researchers from the Sloan-Kettering Institute who explore cancer biology, chemistry, biochemistry, and molecular pharmacology and apply their discoveries to innovations in detecting and treating cancer; and Memorial Hospital physicians with specialties including medical oncology, pediatrics, surgery, and imaging, who treat patients with promising new agents and techniques on more than 300 ongoing clinical trials.
Memorial Sloan-Kettering has a long and distinguished history of cancer drug discovery and development, with a legacy of many effective therapies in use today. The process of drug development has, however, become increasingly more complicated, expensive, and regulated. Acknowledging this, Memorial Sloan-Kettering recognized the opportunity to expand and coordinate its drug development activities. The goal of the Experimental Therapeutics Center is to increase the safety, control, and productivity while reducing the costs and time consumed in the process of drug development, thereby enhancing the care of patients with cancer.
Mission and Scope
The Experimental Therapeutics Center is a multidisciplinary, multi-departmental program that promotes and facilitates the development of new cancer therapies from the bench to the bedside through the following activities:
- Administratively and financially supporting the early phase investigations of new agents and diagnostic techniques developed at MSKCC, including biologics, radiopharmaceuticals, and cellular therapies.
- Coordinating and supporting activities in basic science labs (involved in drug discovery and target identification, mechanism of action and resistance, and structure-function analyses); translational labs and core testing facilities; regulatory bodies (both intramural and extramural); off-site contract research; and clinical teams.
- Improving how new agents are transferred from early phases into the clinical program for more advanced development.
- Recruiting necessary assets (staff, equipment, facilities, money, pharmaceutical partners) in collaboration with the relevant Sloan-Kettering Institute or Memorial Hospital departments to achieve the goals of the program.
- Helping to supervise and support new and existing core laboratories critical to the mission of the Experimental Therapeutics Center.
- Providing education and training to encourage new investigators to join this area and established investigators to improve their work.
- Assisting in the appropriate handling of therapy-related intellectual property to expedite development and maximize value of Sloan-Kettering Institute discoveries via interactions between Memorial Sloan-Kettering drug development efforts and pharmaceutical or biotechnology concerns.
