2023 Salute to Nurses Letters: Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Outstanding nurses from Dana-Farber were included in the 2023 Salute to Nurses from The Boston Globe. Read patient letters about our exceptional nurses.
Visit this page often to hear how our community of donors, clinicians, researchers, and patients are helping Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Jimmy Fund Defy Cancer.
Outstanding nurses from Dana-Farber were included in the 2023 Salute to Nurses from The Boston Globe. Read patient letters about our exceptional nurses.
Gift has launched the Center for Therapeutic Discovery at Dana-Farber to accelerate novel medicines for cancer patients The Linde Family Foundation has made a catalytic gift of $10 million to launch the Center for Therapeutic Discovery at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a center that will be home to a new team devoted to the development of novel therapeutics for patients with rare and hard-to-treat cancers. Investigators across Dana-Farber will be invited to submit their most promising drug candidates for focused funding and expert support. “Dana-Farber continues to lead the way in innovation and drug discovery. It is our hope that this gift...
Gift has launched the Center for Therapeutic Discovery at Dana-Farber to accelerate novel medicines for cancer patients
The Linde Family Foundation has made a catalytic gift of $10 million to launch the Center for Therapeutic Discovery at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a center that will be home to a new team devoted to the development of novel therapeutics for patients with rare and hard-to-treat cancers. Investigators across Dana-Farber will be invited to submit their most promising drug candidates for focused funding and expert support.
“Dana-Farber continues to lead the way in innovation and drug discovery. It is our hope that this gift will bring discoveries even closer to the clinic, leading to new treatments for pediatric and adult cancers,” said Karen Linde Packman, trustee of the Linde Family Foundation and trustee of Dana-Farber.
“The Linde Family Foundation’s commitment to Dana-Farber over the years has been extraordinary and continues with this magnificent gift as part of The Dana-Farber Campaign. Launching the Center for Therapeutic Discovery will ensure our most promising cancer drugs move further along the pre-clinical pipeline and reach patients faster. We are so grateful for the Linde family’s partnership,” said Laurie H. Glimcher, MD, president and CEO of Dana-Farber and the Richard and Susan Smith Professor of Medicine.
This gift, and the center it has launched, builds on the family’s prior support of Dana-Farber’s Chemical Biology Program and Department of Pediatric Oncology, including the Linde Family Program in Cancer Chemical Biology, established by the Linde Family Foundation in 2008 to pursue some of the most intractable problems in new cancer drug design. Since its inception, the Linde Family Program has attracted top scientists and its work has resulted in the formation of seven start-up companies, six new investigational drugs, and three current clinical trials, and has significantly contributed to two FDA-approved drugs, all based on scientific breakthroughs made at Dana-Farber.
The Center for Therapeutic Discovery is co-led by two of Dana-Farber’s leaders in drug discovery, Scott Armstrong, MD, PhD, chair, Department of Pediatric Oncology and the David G. Nathan, MD, Professor of Pediatrics, and Eric Fischer, PhD, director, Chemical Biology Program. They will be guided by an advisory committee of internal and external cancer experts who will help select the most promising therapeutic projects for further development.
Armstrong has made seminal discoveries into the causes of pediatric leukemia and the epigenetic mechanisms that lead to cancer in children. This work has led to several new classes of therapeutics currently being tested in clinical trials for both children and adults with cancer.
Fischer is a world-renowned expert in cutting-edge approaches to structural and chemical biology, including targeted protein degradation.
“This new center will be a resource to all Dana-Farber investigators interested in moving a drug candidate from the bench to the bedside. The most promising projects will receive significant funding to run key experiments and benefit from a new team of experts rarely found in academic medicine. This wonderful gift helps us further foster Dana-Farber’s culture of innovation,” said Fischer.
Drug candidates will be chosen based on their ability to address pediatric and adult cancers with poor treatment outcomes and only move forward if they achieve strict milestones along the pre-clinical pipeline. Bringing Dana-Farber’s best drug candidates closer to clinical trials will facilitate company creation and licensing opportunities for Dana-Farber, leading to new sources of revenue for the Institute to reinvest in its scientific mission. Research is integral to Dana-Farber’s mission and in the last five years, more than half of all FDA-approved cancer drugs were developed with significant contributions from Dana-Farber investigators.
The Center for Therapeutic Discovery is a strategic priority for Dana-Farber and launches with the vision of a $40 million investment over the next five years, comprised of philanthropic and Institute sources. The Linde Family Foundation has pledged an additional $5 million if an equal amount can be raised from other donors and a sustainability plan for the center has been developed.
The gift is part of The Dana-Farber Campaign, the multi-year fundraising effort to prevent, treat, and defy cancer by accelerating revolutionary science, extraordinary care, exceptional expertise, and essential opportunities.
Dana-Farber co-location model shows that bringing services into community health center significantly decreased wait times for diagnoses. A co-location model for cancer diagnostic services designed by researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has reported a reduction in the time it takes to diagnose cancer in a community health center in Boston, MA, that cares for a historically underserved populations, according to a paper published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO) Oncology Practice. This co-location model, which has been in operation for 12 years, reduced time to cancer diagnosis from a median of 32 days to 12 days. “The primary goal of this...
Dana-Farber co-location model shows that bringing services into community health center significantly decreased wait times for diagnoses.
A co-location model for cancer diagnostic services designed by researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has reported a reduction in the time it takes to diagnose cancer in a community health center in Boston, MA, that cares for a historically underserved populations, according to a paper published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO) Oncology Practice. This co-location model, which has been in operation for 12 years, reduced time to cancer diagnosis from a median of 32 days to 12 days.
“The primary goal of this intervention was to decrease the time it took to complete cancer diagnoses,” said senior author Christopher Lathan, MD, MS, MPH, chief clinical access and equity officer and associate medical director at Dana-Farber. “We got it down to 12 days, which was surprising and amazing.”
Cancer disparities are well documented in the U.S. among Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. According to the American Cancer Society, Black people have lower five-year cancer survival rates than white people, and are more likely to be diagnosed with an advanced stage of cancer, when treatment is more difficult and less successful.
Addressing disparities by creating an in-house cancer diagnostic clinic
Lathan and colleagues initiated the program in 2012 in partnership with a federally qualified health center (FQHC) that serves a predominantly Black community with primary care and other health services. Dana-Farber, a National Cancer Institute-designated Cancer Center, designed the program to bring oncology diagnostics and cancer-specific patient navigation services from the NCI-designated cancer center into the community health center to provide cancer diagnostic services.
At the start of the intervention, five Dana-Farber oncologists and the oncology nurse navigator would see patients referred by providers at the health center to evaluate any cancer or hematology related concerns, including abnormal laboratory values, scans, sudden weight loss, family history of cancer, or follow-up care related to a previous cancer diagnosis. The Dana-Farber team practiced in the community hospital under the FQHC license.
The oncology diagnostics team did not provide direct cancer treatment; they worked with the nurse navigator to help direct patients to the right next step, be it prevention services, diagnostic tests, or care at a treatment center. For instance, a patient in need of a scan might be directed to a local hospital with scanning capabilities or to Dana-Farber, depending on the patient’s history, preference, and insurance.
The entire program was built with clinical nurse navigation at its foundation.
“This was a clinic set up to help primary care providers with any cancer related question,” said Lathan. “Our goal was to respond with a reasonable and sensible plan as quickly as possible.”
Making a difference by being present and building trust
Such co-location models have been successful before in other areas of medicine, such as cardiology, but this is the first to attempt to provide cancer diagnostics.
The program was designed to be iterative and responsive. For instance, over time, the clinic developed a lung cancer screening program and an oral health program.
“By being present in the clinic day in and day out, year in and year out, you build trust with the providers and the patients,” said Lathan. “We were able to listen to the practitioners and develop programs over time that support their needs.”
An additional unexpected result was that 10 percent of the patients in the cohort enrolled in clinical trials. This doubles the historical rate of five percent for marginalized populations. The subset of patients seen at the clinic who were diagnosed with cancer enrolled in clinical trials at an even higher rate.
“The clinical trial numbers are intriguing, but more research is required to understand this change,” said Lathan. Further research is also required to understand the cost-effectiveness of the intervention, its scalability, and to get a qualitative sense of how patients responded to the model.
“We don’t want to over-generalize and say we have a solution for the complex challenge of disparities in cancer care delivery,” said Lathan, who noted caveats in the paper, including the relatively small number of patients involved in the cohort and limited information about cancer care and outcomes prior to the program’s implementation. “But I do think this is a model that could be further evaluated and hopefully utilized and adjusted in many different ways to specifically improve the diagnosis of all cancers.”
The model is now in operation in two other FQHCs in Boston.
This research was originally funded by a grant from the Robert and Myra Kraft Family Research 20 Foundation’s Kraft Family Research Fund at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Kimmie Ng, MD, MPH, were featured in a recent article in The Wall Street Journal about rising colorectal cancer rates in younger people. Read the article.
Dana-Farber’s Matthew Davids was interviewed by Good Morning America about lymphoma following actor Sam Neill’s recent blood cancer diagnosis. Watch the interview.
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