Tag: commack

Stony Brook Medicine opened its 6,000-square-foot Clinical Trials Unit at the Advanced Specialty Care at Commack center. Celebrated with a ribbon-cutting on Monday, the unit provides patients with a chance to take part in advanced therapeutic studies and offers physicians and researchers a shared space to conduct clinical trials.

The space expands Stony Brook’s capacity and research infrastructure to support scientifically rigorous clinical trials that integrate discovery and development to explore new treatments and improve patient outcomes. The facility accommodates trial participants across the lifespan, including children, older adults and individuals with physical disabilities.

“As we cut the ribbon on this new Clinical Trials Unit here in Commack, we’re celebrating the opening of a new facility, but more importantly, we’re opening doors to discovery and to hope,” Dr. William Wertheim, executive vice president of Stony Brook Medicine, said in a news release about the unit.

The unit includes 12 examination and consultation rooms, a cardiopulmonary exercise testing facility and a physical performance and gait testing suite. It also features a three-bay infusion area for trials involving chemotherapeutic and intravenous infusions, a procedure room for outpatient trials and a wet lab equipped with a refrigerated centrifuge and a minus-80 F freezer for processing blood and other human samples.

“This space represents the bridge between groundbreaking research in the laboratory and the patients and families we serve every day, right here in our communities,” Wertheim said.

The new unit is designed to make advanced clinical trials more accessible to the people served by the health system.

“For decades, Stony Brook Medicine has been known for translating research from bench to bedside,” Wertheim said. “With this new unit, for the first time, we’re extending that promise beyond the hospital, bringing access to advanced clinical trials closer to where people live and work. It’s a tangible example of how we’re strengthening our connection to the community and ensuring that participation in world-class research is not limited by distance or circumstance.”

Dr. Peter Igarashi, the dean of the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, shared that sentiment.

“Academic medicine brings added value in the form of expertise of our academic faculty clinicians, as well as access to state-of-the-art technologies and access to clinical trials, and that’s why we have built this facility,” Igarashi said in the news release. “We look forward to the exciting discoveries that will emerge from the research program for years to come.”

Now fully operational, the unit is staffed with specialists and principal investigators to manage trials from planning to execution. The unit will conduct studies on a range of conditions, including neurological, cardiovascular, pulmonary, kidney, cancer, mental health and infectious diseases.

“Currently, we have 260 active clinical trials,” Dr. Susan Hedayati, vice dean for research in the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, said in the news release.

“These trials account for a vast majority of all of the clinical trials within SUNY academic institutions,” Hedayati added. “By building this Commack Clinical Trials Unit, we’re very enthusiastic that we will have the capacity to significantly and substantially increase this number.”