The Tisch Cancer Institute is making its advanced therapies and cancer clinical trials more accessible to patients in Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island, and throughout Manhattan so that patients can receive these potential breakthrough treatments closer to where they live
or work.

The move expands the actual number of clinical trials now being offered and incorporates the Mount Sinai Health System’s eight hospitals into one vast clinical trials network. Essential oversight of the trials will continue to be handled at The Mount Sinai Hospital, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.  

This expansion is being led by Karyn A. Goodman, MD, MS, an internationally recognized expert in gastrointestinal cancer, who joined The Tisch Cancer Institute in 2019 as Associate Director of Clinical Research.

“Most of these studies will be focused on breast, colon, and lung cancer and will give us a chance to enroll and see a lot of patients out in the community,” says Dr. Goodman, who is also Professor and Vice Chair of Clinical Research in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “We thought why should patients have to spend a lot of time and effort traveling to upper Manhattan when it could be done much closer to their homes? That way we could increase the potential pool of patients, while allowing them to take advantage of some great treatment options, like immunotherapies.”

In September, Dr. Goodman was joined by Deirdre J. Cohen, MD, MS, also an expert in gastrointestinal oncology, and a new recruit to The Tisch Cancer Institute, who will serve as
Medical Director of the Cancer Clinical Trials Office. Dr. Cohen, the principal investigator of numerous clinical trials to treat gastrointestinal malignancies is Associate Professor of Medicine (Hematology and Medical Oncology) at the Icahn School of Medicine, and Director of the Gastrointestinal Oncology Program for the Mount Sinai Health System.

The decision to expand Mount Sinai’s cancer clinical trials footprint was hastened by the COVID-19 pandemic and the Health System’s participation in a study on convalescent plasma, which began in late March 2020, at the peak of the pandemic in New York City. The convalescent plasma study involved teams of research nurses, coordinators, and regulatory staff from throughout the Health System and The Tisch Cancer Institute.

For Dr. Goodman, treating so many patients with COVID-19 was a “trial-by-fire” experience, and reinforced her belief that satellite locations had in place the right staffing, resources, and standard operating procedures to allow the oncology clinical trials program to spread its wings.

“We learned that a lot of the essential paperwork and data management for trials could be done centrally at The Mount Sinai Hospital, where we have the people and resources, and that these could support the doctors who are running the trials at other Mount Sinai sites,” she says.

As a National Cancer Institute (NCI)-designated center, The Tisch Cancer Institute will now apply the format to a growing number of NCI-led studies in which it is participating as part of the National Clinical Trials Network.

To find out more about our cancer clinical trials,

please go to https://icahn.mssm.edu/research/tisch/clinical-trials