Meet a Library User: Dr. Sigrid Carlsson, MD, PhD, MPH

Welcome to the first installment of the MSK Library Blog’s new series, Meet a Library User. These interviews will shine a spotlight on some of the many MSK employees who use the Library and the fascinating work that they accomplish.  

In this inaugural post, we’re speaking with Dr. Sigrid Carlsson, MD, PhD, MPH, Director of Clinical Research at MSK’s Josie Robertson Surgery Center and Assistant Attending Epidemiologist. She holds dual appointments with MSK’s Department of Surgery in the Urology Service and with the Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics. Dr. Carlsson frequently uses MSK Library services and we are delighted to have spent time getting to know more about her and her work at MSK.

The following conversation has been edited and condensed.

Dr. Sigrid Carlsson seated in front of desk, speaking.

Image courtesy MSK Digital Asset Library

Could you discuss your research agenda, in simple terms? What current research projects are you working on that you’re particularly excited about?

Yes, certainly. I’m at Josie Robertson Surgery Center. It’s our ambulatory surgery center at MSK. Here we do surgeries where patients either go home the same day or after a night’s hospital stay. It’s within twenty-four hours, mostly. We do prostatectomies and mastectomies, and hysterectomies and all sorts of procedures. A lot of different surgeries—complex surgeries—are performed here, and of course the others are done at Main Campus. What I do here [at the Josie Robertson Surgery Center] is I am the Director of Clinical Research, so I oversee all our research activities that go on in this building. There’s urology, breast, head and neck, plastics, gynecology, anesthesia, nursing, and multidisciplinary research. It’s wonderful to be a part of. And with that in mind, we do a lot of studies, both clinical trials and also retrospective research studies. We need the literature to see what’s out there—what’s already been done and what we can do. We also put in a lot of grant proposals. So that’s where MSK Library is fantastic, and we really couldn’t do what we do without you.

That’s great, thank you. How did you become interested in cancer research, and prostate cancer research in particular?

Oh, good question, now I have to go back twenty years. I was living in Sweden, where I’m from, and I was in medical school doing a research project on evidence-based medicine. Screening in Sweden at the time, the government sent envelopes to women to get mammography screening and cervical cancer screening and I was wondering, why don’t men get an envelope to go for prostate cancer screening with a PSA test? So that’s what sparked my interest. And at the time I was in my surgery rotation during medical school and I met Professor Jonas Hugosson, who was running a large randomized trial of PSA screening versus no screening for prostate cancer. In those days, we didn’t have the same amount of evidence. So the question was, “Does early testing with this blood test really reduce prostate cancer mortality?” in the way we knew from mammography or with cervical cancer screening by doing the pap smear. And that’s really how I got into it. I’ve been an investigator of that trial—a trial in Göteborg in Sweden—for nearly twenty years. That trial really showed that screening does reduce prostate cancer mortality. And it was also part of a large European study. And now that trial has matured into another trial, the Göteborg-2 trial, which is looking at combining the PSA test (the blood test) with MRI (imaging the prostate), which is sort of the paradigm shift in prostate cancer screening today, that we incorporate blood-based biomarkers together with imaging. The field is evolving, and I’m still very curious and passionate about this topic.

Wow, that’s interesting that a government service first brought your attention to the discrepancies.

Yes, and also I think because of my parents, I mean, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. My dad was a doctor, and my mom is a nurse, and they were always very interested in preventive medicine—what we can do to find diseases early and prevent them and lifestyle and all of that. So it was also at home that I became interested. But then, the more I studied, the more I learned about the nuances and how complex it is because prostate cancer is such a heterogeneous disease. Sometimes we find low-grade cancers, and many of those men can live very long and happy lives without any treatment at all. Then the challenge is to find the aggressive ones early and treat those. So there’s a lot that goes into it.

You’re part of a Multidisciplinary Expert Panel convened by the Prostate Cancer Foundation to develop guidelines for prostate cancer screening and treatment for Black men in the U.S. Could you talk a little bit about the work that goes into establishing guidelines like these, and how you’ll be involving the MSK Library to support that work?

It’s definitely key that we gather the best available evidence to support any guideline recommendations on a public health scale. So that’s why the literature, the library service again is key because we need a methodologist who is an expert in searching the literature and using the keywords, which is a whole field of science in and of itself. You really know how to search multiple databases and choose the words and combine the ANDs and the ORs and which inclusion and exclusion criteria to have. And you really want to have a narrow enough search so that you don’t drown in 10,000 references to screen, but also a comprehensive enough search so that you are sure that you have included all the relevant references that are out there. So that’s why your expertise and methodology is really, really crucial. And so we work together. We are the experts of the topic and the field. We know some of those references, of course. And some of us have contributed to that evidence, but we also need an objective methodologist who can see from a bird’s eye perspective and help gather all the evidence in a smart way to synthesize it.

If you could tell the world just one thing about prostate cancer, what would it be?

I think we’ve made major headways in prostate cancer over the past years, so I think we are now very good at finding what patients need. As Dr. Scardino, the MSK urologist and former Chairman of Surgery, would say, “the right treatment for the right patient at the right time.” And I think we are very, very good at that in prostate cancer today. So, for example, if you have a man with low-grade disease, then all the guidelines say that active surveillance should be the first management option. But then if you have high-grade disease, then we know that a multimodal treatment regimen is recommended. And at MSK we have all those experts in one house. We have urologists, radiation oncologists, and medical oncologists, so we really have everybody in the field. I would say that we’ve learned so much about the biology and the natural history of prostate cancer that we know exactly who and when to treat. And also, having worked in the field of screening, we know that the blood test, PSA, is one of the best tumor markers that we have. One single blood draw can determine your long-term risk of developing lethal prostate cancer. It’s a very simple, cheap, and effective test, which is really remarkable. I don’t know of any other tumor marker that is as sensitive and specific as the PSA test.

It’s wonderful to hear you talk about this.

We all have our own soapboxes, right? But still, after twenty years, I’m still so fascinated by this field, and how it’s evolving, and what we can do to improve the lives of men at risk for this disease. It’s still the number one most common cancer among U.S. men, and especially Black men have increased risk. So we do whatever we can do to improve on that.

Could you share some of the ways you use MSK Library?

I use MSK Library all the time. For manuscripts, when we have summer students, urology fellows, postdocs, and faculty. I always reach out using the contact form, with our research question, finding out what’s been written before, because we don’t want to reinvent the wheel if somebody else has already done the work. And for grant submissions, it’s also key, and sometimes for our quality improvement projects. Say that we want to start a new clinical pathway, and we want to see what’s out there. And then this broader initiative with the guideline, it’s super helpful. And you are fantastic at systematic reviews. We work with your colleagues [at the Library] on systematic reviews, and using the Covidence software has been incredibly helpful. And the PRISMA flow chart, finding a search that’s comprehensive but also narrow enough that the scope becomes doable. I supervised two urology fellows, and they screened 3,000 papers over a couple of weeks over the summer. So it was a lot of work for the two of them, but it will be published in one of the major urology journals and will be a very highly cited paper. It’s so great, the service that you provide. And it is really a skillset that we don’t have as clinicians or researchers. It’s really a specific field of knowledge that you have as informationists. I’m your biggest supporter!

Final question for you, what’s your favorite thing about living or working in New York City?

Oh, I mean, it has everything, right? The people, the diversity, the vibrant environment—it’s the city that never sleeps! All the restaurants, the shows, the New York Philharmonic, Central Park, and especially working at MSK, it’s such a wonderful place. There’s no place like it, I would say. There are so many different departments, and we all come together to work. And I feel like everybody who’s here, we’re here for a reason and we have a purpose and a mission. I think people are very, very dedicated. And we always put patients first. We all come together for the same cause. Even the library service, you help contribute to disseminating knowledge to the world.

Many thanks to Dr. Carlsson for speaking with us. If you would like to know more about MSK Library’s services, please see our Help page. And if you already use the Library and would like to be featured in this series, don’t hesitate to reach out!

Interview by Rebecca Meng, MSLIS

75 Years! MSK Library Reaches Milestone Anniversary! #MSKLibrary75

An image of Candles all in a row to celebrate the Library's 75th Anniversary.

We’re so excited!  And want to invite you to take a trip down memory lane with us.

How did we arrive at our anniversary date? While searching the MSK Archives, an annual report was located that references a library as early as 1921–1922. Upon further investigation, we uncovered that this was a departmental library and that the formation of the library that is the direct predecessor of the library we know today first opened its doors in April 1948. The library was dedicated and named in honor of Lee Coombe, the daughter of Reginald Coombe, the President of Memorial Hospital. The Lee Coombe Memorial Library was located in a building that was later named for Frank Howard.

Today, the MSK Library continues to support the clinical, research, administrative and educational needs of the Institution and beyond. Over the years, the Library has marked many changes, moving from print to a mostly digital collection, offering new services and resources that reflect the information needs of the medical and research activities of the organization, and providing a space where reflection, collaboration, and focus on scholarly activities was and continues to be encouraged and supported.

For the remainder of this year, we have plans to share a timeline of the MSK Library’s accomplishments, events, launches, and changes, starting in the late 1940s and working our way to the present. We plan to illustrate interesting facts about our early beginnings and how we evolved via the MSK Library Blog, our social media platforms, and OneMSK. We also will share fascinating tidbits about the history of health science libraries over the years.

We’ll be tagging all our posts, tweets, photos, and videos with the hashtag #MSKLibrary75.  Join our celebration tour to learn more about our history, our role within the Institution, and the services we provide. Subscribe to the MSK Library Blog, or follow us on Twitter, @MSKLibrary or Instagram, @msklibrary

Donna Gibson, Director, Library Services

Springer Nature No Longer Providing Manuscript Deposition Service

Effective immediately, Springer Nature has decided to no longer offer a full manuscript deposition service to their NIH-funded authors. Authors (usually the corresponding author) or their assigned delegate, will now be responsible for handling the task of depositing the accepted manuscript in the NIH Manuscript Submission (NIHMS) system to fulfill any funder or institutional mandate. Instructions for this task can be found on the Memorial Sloan Kettering NIH Public Access Policy LibGuide. Look for the tab labelled, Submission Method C.

Springer Nature will continue to automatically deposit gold open access (OA) articles in PMC (PubMed Central) and EPMC (Europe PubMed Central) if the research paper meets the PMC deposition guidelines on publisher deposition of papers published open access. Authors can confirm if a journal has a full PMC deposition agreement by searching for the journal title here.

It is critical that authors provide details of the grant when submitting their manuscript for publication to enable Springer Nature to identify eligible OA NIH-funded articles for deposit in the NIHMS system.

Should you have any questions or concerns, don’t hesitate to reach out to Donna Gibson, Director, Library Services.