Dateline DFCI
The new Clinical Research Center offers patients and staff more space and privacy.
State-of-the-art facility supports clinical research at DFCI
Patients, caregivers, and investigators involved in testing new cancer therapies now have a state-of-the-art space at Dana-Farber designated for the most complex of these studies. The Clinical Research Center opened in the Jimmy Fund Building early this year to serve patients whose treatments may take as long as 10 hours at a time.
"This center will make us an even more attractive home for the most exciting clinical trials coming out of the pharmaceutical and biotech industries," says DFCI President Edward J. Benz Jr., MD. "As part of our new Center for Clinical and Translational Research, it fits right into the heart of the Institute's strategic plan to further apply our scientific research and patient care to the development of new and more effective therapies."
Staffed by a team of nurses and pharmacists specializing in managing patients who are participating in protocols, the new unit features eight infusion areas with windows, a solarium, a nurses' station, a sample-collection area, and a satellite pharmacy. It will accommodate about 10 percent of the 300-plus clinical trials now under way through the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. Patients in these studies were previously cared for in the Institute's busy general clinic spaces.
Sharon Lane, RN, MSN, OCN, director of clinical trials operations at Dana-Farber, has been instrumental in developing the center, which, fittingly, is housed where Institute founder Sidney Farber, MD, conducted his pioneering chemotherapy experiments more than a half-century ago. "We hope," she says, "this facility will help our patients on trials be more comfortable while maintaining safety and enabling staff to conduct investigations in a sophisticated, focused way."
