MSK Technologist James Kim works on a lab test.
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) continues to enhance patient care, as well as build on our leadership and dedication to conquering cancer, by utilizing the latest technology. MSK’s newly opened Center for Laboratory Medicine on East 64th Street manages almost 2 million specimens and generating approximately 10 million test results per year for all of MSK’s facilities across New York and New Jersey. It will serve as the core of MSK’s pathology and diagnostic testing facilities and be equipped for CAR T therapy and fecal transplants as well as rapid molecular testing for infectious diseases and post-CAR T treatment monitoring.
The Department of Laboratory Medicine, which will call the new building home, is the heart of MSK. It runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, processing 5,000 patient specimens and performing 25,000 clinical laboratory tests daily. These results are crucial for patients and doctors to make decisions about treatment. The state-of-the-art Center for Laboratory Medicine provides a large, dedicated space to do this and more.
The building, which reflects many of the principles established by the US Green Building Council, is the largest freestanding clinical laboratory in the city. Here, clinical pathologists, chemists, microbiologists, hematologists, lab assistants, and clinical laboratory technologists can do everything from platelet counts for people receiving chemotherapy to cell studies that monitor the effectiveness of immunotherapies. Lab medicine specialists can also develop new laboratory tests and diagnostic platforms to better understand increasingly complex cancer therapies. Examples include mass spectroscopy to measure levels of the latest chemotherapeutic agents and metabolomic methods to analyze a patient’s gut microbiome.
At these professionals’ fingertips are technologies that are not in use by healthcare organizations anywhere else in the United States. One example is a vertical transport module (VTM) that allows individual specimens to be moved between floors, eliminating batch specimens and decreasing result turnaround times. This is part of an innovative automation line enabling streamlined processing and testing, facilitating clinical decision-making and improving patient care.
The addition of this new laboratory is a testament to MSK’s continued dedication to improving patient outcomes by embracing the latest technology.
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