Napster co-Founder Sean Parker is donating $250 million dollars to create the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, a collaboration of six leading academic centers ,including MSK, to pave the way to develop new therapies to use patient’s own immune systems to fight cancer. The Institute will  share research materials and discoveries and jointly conduct clinical trials to try to accelerate progress. “How do we get more therapies to market faster and more cheaply?” Mr. Parker said in an interview, adding that his effort represented a new “blueprint for biomedical research funding.”

MSK will be hosting a new phase 2 clinical trial study for ovarian cancer starting this summer with TapImmune and AstraZeneca/MedImmune. The trial will be of TapImmune’s cancer vaccine TPIV 200, a multi-epitope anti-folate receptor vaccine (FRα), in combination with AstraZeneca’s durvalumab , an anti-PD-L1 antibody, in patients with platinum-resistant ovarian cancer.

The innovation in the Josie Robertson Surgery Center (JRSC) is making waves across the health informatics, hospital, and technology communities, as the “smart” technology implemented into the design of the outpatient center, specifically the real-time location system (RTLS), is something not seen anywhere else in the country. According to Pete Stetson, MD, Chief Health Informatics Officer at MSK,  “We wanted to re-envision the way we would deploy those systems and push them as far as we could all the way to the edge to wrap around the patient as opposed to having the patient do whatever we need them to do. And to do that, you need to have the building itself as an agent in the care of the patient.”

Dr. Francesca Gany, Director of MSK’s Center for Immigrant Health and Cancer Disparities, works to identify immigrant communities at high risk for certain cancers. The center’s current focus has been increasing HPV vaccination rates among Mexican immigrant children, since cervical cancer rates are high among this population.