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. Continue reading →

Craig Thompson, MD, President and CEO of MSK, makes the list of one of the Top 50 Most Influential Physician Executives and Leaders of 2016. The advances in cancer treatment and research has brought Dr. Thompson and MSK to the forefront of medical research and leadership. According to Thompson, “We’re really at a pivotal time when we can deliver on all the basic research and translational research from the past 25 years” leading to targeted treatments for individual tumors. “This isn’t science fiction. We’re doing it every day.”

Becker’s Hospital Review asked Craig to discuss their 7 questions about hospital leadership and management.

Craig Thompson was also the keynote speaker at the March 31st Lasker Lessons in Leadership Lecture in Bethesda, MD. He discussed the leadership strategies and the difference between leadership and management.

View the lecture here: Lasker Lessons in Leadership: Leadership in Medicine/Public Health Continue reading →

Thomson Reuters announced their 2015 list of the World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds. How they create this list is based on several factors summarized below:

“The some 3,000 highly cited researchers listed in this report were selected by analyzing citation data over a recent 11-year period (2003-2013) and identifying those who published the greatest number of highly cited papers. We also identified hot researchers, authors of papers published in a recent two-year period (2013-2014) that were cited immediately after publication at extraordinarily high levels. Highly cited papers rank in the top 1% and hot papers rank in the top 0.1% of the citation distributions of comparable papers, those matched for field and age.”

Thomson Reuters’ list includes the following fourteen MSK researchers:

• Jose Baselga, MD, PhD – Medical Oncologist, Physician-in-Chief and Chief Medical Officer, Memorial Hospital
• Frederic Geissmann, MD, PhD – Researcher, William E. Snee Chair of Immunology, Sloan Kettering Institute
• Clifford A Hudis, MD – Medical Oncologist, Vice President for Government Relations and Chief Advocacy Officer; Chief, Breast Medicine Service
• Mark G Kris, MD – Medical Oncologist, William and Joy Ruane Chair in Thoracic Oncology
• Marc Ladanyi, MD – Molecular Geneticist, Chief, Molecular Diagnostics Service; William J. Ruane Chair in Molecular Oncology
• Joan Massagué, PhD – Researcher, Director, Sloan Kettering Institute
• Gregory J Riely, MD, PhD – Medical Oncologist, Vice Chair, Clinical Trials Office, Department of Medicine
• Alexander Y Rudensky, PhD – Chair, Immunology Program, Sloan Kettering Institute; Director, Ludwig Center for Cancer Immunotherapy, Memorial Sloan Kettering
• Chris Sander, PhD – Program Chairman and Director, Computational Biology Center, Sloan Kettering Institute
• Charles L Sawyers, MD – Internist and Hematologic Oncologist, Chair, Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program; Marie-Josee and Henry R. Kravis Chair
• Howard I Scher, MD – Medical Oncologist, Chief, Genitourinary Oncology Service; D. Wayne Calloway Chair in Urologic Oncology
• Martin S Tallman, MD – Hematologic Oncologist, Chief, Leukemia Service
• Craig B Thompson, MD – President and CEO, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
• William D Travis, MD – Pathologist, Director, Thoracic Pathology