Press Releases

When Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) opened its doors along Commack Road in 2002, eastern Long Islanders no longer needed to navigate congested roadways and train lines bound for Manhattan to receive personalized cancer care. Today, more than 14 years later, MSK is reinforcing its commitment to the local community in the form of a 38,000-plus-square-foot addition complete with enhancements to both clinical programs and physical spaces.

There has been much recent excitement about immunotherapy and the use of genetically engineered chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells. Historically, CAR T cell immunotherapy has aimed to boost the immune system by giving immune cells the information they need to better recognize tumor cells as foreign and attack them. New work led by Hans-Guido Wendel, MD, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), and collaborator Karin Tarte of the University of Rennes, France, illustrates an untapped potential of CAR T cells to act as targeted delivery vehicles that can function as “micro-pharmacies” for precise therapeutic delivery.

In an effort to expand and streamline patient access to its high-quality cancer care, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center has introduced MSK Direct, a unique program in which MSK collaborates with external employers to simplify how their employees can engage with us for initial or ongoing cancer care.

Men with metastatic prostate cancer should be considered for germline genetic testing of DNA repair genes, regardless of age or family history, according to a team of researchers from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, University of Washington School of Medicine, University of Michigan, and the Institute of Cancer Research Royal Marsden Hospital.

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) molecular pharmacologist Daniel Heller, PhD, and colleagues have identified a new strategy to target drugs specifically to cancer sites, including metastatic tumors. The approach involves nanoparticles designed to mimic a mechanism that tumors themselves use to metastasize throughout the body. This work, which will be featured on the cover of the June 29 issue of Science Translational Medicine, was applicable across a wide range of tumor and drug types and can potentially be applied to other conditions including vascular and autoimmune diseases.

Andrew L. Kung, MD, PhD, has been named the new Chairman of the Department of Pediatrics at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK). An accomplished physician, researcher, leader, and mentor, Dr. Kung most recently served as the Chief of the Division of Pediatric Hematology, Oncology, and Stem Cell Transplantation at New York-Presbyterian/Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital and Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC). Dr. Kung formally assumes his new role as Richard J. O’Reilly, MD, steps down as Chairman after more than 30 years.

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), The Rockefeller University, and Weill Cornell Medicine today announced that they will expand the focus of the successful Tri-Institutional Therapeutics Discovery Institute, Inc. (Tri-I TDI), a partnership established in 2013 to expedite early-stage drug discovery of innovative new therapies. Under this expansion, Tri-I TDI will extend its current relationship with its industry partner, Takeda Pharmaceutical Company, Ltd. from the realm of small molecule discovery into the new research area of antibody drug discovery. All three institutions will benefit from Tri-I TDI’s expansion.

The experimental “smart-bomb” drug rovalpituzumab tesirine (Rova-T) appears safe and shows efficacy in treating patients with advanced small cell lung cancer, according to results from a first-in-human clinical trial to be presented today by a MSK researcher at the 2016 American Society of Clinical Oncology Annual Meeting in Chicago.