New York City’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering, the oldest and largest cancer treatment center in the country, announced Tuesday it has formed a new partnership with Hartford Healthcare that will significantly expand access to new clinical trials in Greater Hartford.
Under the partnership, MSK will conduct clinical cancer trials at Hartford Hospital, which it said will dramatically improve patient access to the latest cancer treatment advancements.
The deal provides MSK with a wider pool of potential clinical trial participants. The Wall Street Journal reported today that advances in genetic testing have allowed researchers to target cancer drugs to specific strains of the disease, a development that calls for a larger patient pool in order to find patients with those strains.
MSK said it’s forming the cancer alliance — which will also aims bring in other hospitals around the country — at a time when the Institute of Medicine has described the challenge of delivering high-quality cancer care as a national crisis. With 2.3 million cancer diagnoses per year expected by 2030, many patients still don’t have access to oncology specialists and sophisticated genetic testing and trials, MSK said.
“Through the MSK Cancer Alliance, MSK and HHC will together develop strategies to improve outcomes, and reduce the barriers to high-quality cancer care that many patients and families in Connecticut face today,” Andrew Salner, director of Hartford Hospital’s Helen & Harry Gray Cancer Center, said in a statement. “This alliance gives us the chance to expedite the time it takes to get the most-advanced treatment to our patients, eliminating barriers that often exist.”
Hartford Healthcare and its affiliated hospitals have been working on this partnership deal for about a year, officials said. With an agreement now in place, Sloan-Kettering and Hartford Healthcare will spend the next six months hashing out the particulars of the partnership. But it will include significant collaboration among providers at both institutions, including in real-time through video conferencing.
