September 23, 2003
New DFCI center to offer cutting-edge clinical research and care
An architectural rendering of the CRC. (Courtesy of Miller Dyer Spears)
In a space carved out of Sidney Farber, MD,'s original clinic, the Institute has created a state-of-the-art facility for testing the newest cancer therapies, reflecting a renewed commitment to excellent clinical research.
When it opens next month, the Clinical Research Center (CRC) will continue Dana-Farber's efforts to enhance patient safety and comfort and ensure that complicated research protocols are followed precisely. At the same time, it will centralize and coordinate the work of physician-scientists throughout Dana-Farber as never before.
"The CRC will help bring us together as a community of clinically focused investigators," says George Demetri, MD, of Medical Oncology. "It will definitely help us bring our discoveries to the clinic more effectively and rapidly, and it will make our Institute more attractive as a collaborative partner with pharmaceutical and biotech companies for clinical trials of important new agents."
Located on the first floor of the Jimmy Fund Building adjacent to the Kraft Family Blood Donor Center, the CRC will be staffed by a team of nurses who specialize in managing patients who are participating in studies. Their aim is to ensure that patients receive continuity of care and that samples of blood, urine, and tissues are obtained according to complicated protocol demands. Following these guidelines, Dana-Farber scientists attest, will guarantee the high level of experimental quality that drug companies value when choosing sites for testing therapies.
Physician-researchers, who have traditionally juggled all their patients in busy general clinic spaces, now will have a separate space for certain clinical-trial subjects.
Lee Nadler, MD
"Dana-Farber has made a strategic decision to build a unit that will allow us to continue caring for patients with a high level of safety while conducting these investigations in a sophisticated way," says Lee Nadler, MD, senior vice president for experimental medicine, who spearheaded the effort to create the CRC. "We are going to be focused on breaking the back of the disease."
A welcome destination
Sharon Lane, RN, MSN, OCN, director of clinical trials operations, says the clinic will open with five infusion chairs but rapidly expand to nine plus one bed. Staffing will ultimately include seven RNs, two facilitators, one or two clinical assistants, a nurse manager, and an operations manager.
Samples taken from patients will be processed and frozen in the lab and then dispatched to other Dana-Farber research labs or outside commercial and drug company labs. There, precious data will be extracted for evaluating new therapies.
DFCI's new center complements the longstanding General Clinical Research Center at partnering Brigham and Women's Hospital. According to Lane, BWH leaders "were very helpful in planning for our unit; we gained a lot from seeing how their center operates."
More than 300 clinical trials in adults are currently under way at DFCI in collaboration with other institutions within the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. About 10 percent of these studies are likely to be selected for the CRC, which will focus on Phase I trials (for drugs being tested for the first time in humans). Patients on other trials will continue their treatments in Dana-Farber's general clinics.
The CRC will be a welcome destination for patients on complex trials, whose treatments may take as long as 10 hours, and it will free up space in the Dana building's sometimes-crowded waiting rooms and clinics.
"Now they will be seen in a beautiful new unit that focuses on patients on research protocols," says Heidi Waitkus, RSN, BSN, program nurse leader of the CRC. "It has windows, a TV, and a solarium area where patients can sit. We hope it will help make their long visits more comfortable."
Construction has been under way for the past five or so months by the William A. Berry & Son construction company, with architectural work by Miller Dyer Spears and input from patients and families on the center's layout, design, and décor. Despite its modern equipment and surroundings, the CRC retains the Italian marble columns of Sidney Farber's original clinic. There, starting with its 1952 opening, sick youngsters could ride a small carousel and watch a TV and electric train embedded in a "magic mountain" while receiving the first effective chemotherapy for leukemia.
Edward J. Benz Jr., MD
"It has a certain poetry to it," says Dana-Farber President Edward J. Benz Jr., MD. "Our 21st-century cutting-edge clinical research will be housed in the place where chemotherapy was basically born."
"Huge commitment"
By opening the CRC, says Nadler, "Dana-Farber is saying that the quality of our trials and the way we conduct them is central to our work. We're making a huge commitment to this."
Benz says the Clinical Research Center "will make us an even more attractive home for the most exciting clinical trials coming out of the pharmaceutical and biotech industry." And, he adds, the facility "fits right into the heart of our strategic plan and core values. This is the kind of capability we need to make a greater impact on cancer."
Elizabeth Maher, MD, PhD, of Medical Oncology, who treats patients with brain tumors and carries out trials, says that in the past, blood samples might remain frozen for periods of time while physician-researchers were busy with patients. Nurses, she adds, manage to administer drugs, give outstanding care to the patients, and meet the additional protocol demands for the many extra blood drawings; this center will hopefully ease some of their workload.
Elizabeth Maher, MD, PhD
"We're very excited about the CRC," says Maher. "It's a fantastic way to do early-phase clinical trials, and it will be great for our patients. It will help Dana-Farber in the race to beat the disease."
