A legendary investment banker and his wife have granted $100 million to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center to create an initiative to systematically analyze every patient’s cancer at the genomic level. The Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Center for Molecular Oncology occupies about 5,700 square feet of newly renovated laboratory space in Memorial Sloan-Kettering’s Zuckerman Research Center. Henry Kravis, a co-founder of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., has a personal fortune approaching $5 billion. The center has about 100 employees, including some current lab investigators. Staff will use the Memorial Sloan-Kettering-developed assay, the integrated mutation profiling of actionable cancer targets, or TARGET, for screening purposes, among other diagnostic tools. TARGET can screen for mutations in 341 separate cancer genes. “Progress in our understanding of the biology of cancer has completely shifted the way we think about and treat cancer,” said Craig Thompson, M.D., Memorial Sloan-Kettering’s president and chief executive officer. “We’re moving away from the concept of treating cancer as many different types of the same disease and toward treating each person’s cancer as its own unique disease.” The center’s goal is to analyze at least 10,000 cancer tumors during its first year of operation and eventually offer genomic analysis of […]
A legendary investment banker and his wife have granted $100 million to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center to create an initiative to systematically analyze every patient’s cancer at the genomic level.
The Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Center for Molecular Oncology occupies about 5,700 square feet of newly renovated laboratory space in Memorial Sloan-Kettering’s Zuckerman Research Center. Henry Kravis, a co-founder of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., has a personal fortune approaching $5 billion.
The center has about 100 employees, including some current lab investigators. Staff will use the Memorial Sloan-Kettering-developed assay, the integrated mutation profiling of actionable cancer targets, or TARGET, for screening purposes, among other diagnostic tools. TARGET can screen for mutations in 341 separate cancer genes.
“Progress in our understanding of the biology of cancer has completely shifted the way we think about and treat cancer,” said Craig Thompson, M.D., Memorial Sloan-Kettering’s president and chief executive officer. “We’re moving away from the concept of treating cancer as many different types of the same disease and toward treating each person’s cancer as its own unique disease.”
The center’s goal is to analyze at least 10,000 cancer tumors during its first year of operation and eventually offer genomic analysis of every kind of cancer. It plans to enroll patients into narrow phase one clinical trials known as basket studies in order to offer them medications based on the specific genetic mutations. It will also study patients known as “exceptional responders”—those who react positively to a medication that did not work for most other patients. In the past, Memorial Sloan-Kettering performed whole-gene sequencing on a patient with advanced bladder cancer who had an exceptional response to the drug Afinitor. This led to the discovery of a mutation in the TSC1 gene, which now allows for the targeted use of Afinitor.
“Our integrated clinical and scientific teams coupled with our ever-increasing genetic sequencing capabilities will allow us to build upon the molecular insights we’ve gleaned over the past decade to accelerate the development of more effective and less toxic cancer therapies,” said David B. Solit, M.D., the center’s director.
Takeaway: A single large donation could push progress in genomic oncology.
