Press Releases

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) has announced that Debra Berns has been named as MSK’s Senior Vice President and Chief Risk Officer following an extensive national search.

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center has recruited Sohrab Shah, PhD, to serve as the inaugural Chief of Computational Oncology within the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. In this role, Dr. Shah will lead the effort to build a research program dedicated to harnessing MSK’s numerous “Big Data” resources to translate biologic knowledge to clinical practice.

The combination of nivolumab (Opdivo®) and ipilimumab (Yervoy®) has shown improved progression-free survival (PFS) compared with chemotherapy as a first-line treatment for people with a high tumor mutational burden (TMB) in advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Data from the CheckMate -227 trial is being reported by Matthew Hellmann, MD, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, at the AACR Annual Meeting 2018. This research is featured in the meeting’s press program, and findings are being presented in the Clinical Trials Plenary Session, “Immunotherapy Combinations: The New Frontier in Lung Cancer.”

Treating people with advanced metastatic kidney cancer using a combination of the immunotherapy drugs nivolumab (Opdivo®) and ipilimumab (Yervoy®) significantly increased overall survival versus treatment with sunitinib (Sutent®) alone, according to new findings from researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) that were reported online today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) report today in the New England Journal of Medicine that adult patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) who received chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy responded better if they had a small amount of disease at the time of the treatment. Compared with patients with a greater amount of disease, those in the low-disease category lived significantly longer and experienced fewer life-threatening side effects.  

Two projects from a portfolio of 57 that the Tri-I TDI has supported have “graduated” with the demonstration that the compounds under study work in preclinical contexts. These compounds are now ready for the next phase of therapeutic development – a phase intended to lead to investigational new drugs. A third project, which originated at Weill Cornell Medicine, is expected to move forward later this month. These projects are candidates for advancement into Bridge Medicines, Inc., a for-profit company established in 2016 by the three Tri-I TDI academic founders, Takeda, and two investment firms – Bay City Capital and Deerfield Management – designed to take Tri-I TDI projects into readiness for clinical trials over a two- to three-year time frame.

Viviane Tabar, MD, has been named the new Chair of the Department of Neurosurgery at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK). Dr. Tabar has been a vital faculty member at MSK for more than 15 years and is currently the Theresa C. Feng Chair for Neurosurgical Oncology and the Vice Chair for Neurosurgical Research and Education.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced today the authorization of MSK-IMPACT™ (which stands for integrated mutation profiling of actionable cancer targets), a high throughput, targeted-DNA-sequencing panel for somatic mutations. Created by the Department of Pathology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), MSK-IMPACT is a 468-gene oncopanel intended to detect gene mutations and other critical genetic aberrations in both rare and common cancers.

Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) has named three investigators as recipients of this year’s Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research. The award recognizes promising investigators aged 45 or younger at the time of nomination for their efforts in advancing cancer research.

Memorial Sloan Kettering, one of the nation’s top cancer treatment and research institutions, is expanding its reach on Long Island with a new 114,000-square-foot freestanding cancer treatment center in Nassau County. Once complete, MSK Nassau will house the area’s most comprehensive cancer care program, centrally located and staffed by the most forward-thinking and compassionate healthcare teams whose sole focus is caring for people with cancer.