Smilow

The Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale officially opened for business yesterday morning. That's a very good thing (for me and many others).


They actually had the dedication last week. I didn't attend, so I don't know if it was like the Open House for the St. Raphael's Hospital satellite cancer center that opened a mile from my house last year. (Isabel and I wondered then about what an open house for a cancer center would involve, and joked that Chemo the Clown might show up and make balloon animal lymph nodes. We were close -- the local paper showed a picture of a CT Scan machine with balloons on it.)


All kidding aside, Smilow looks like a wonderful facility.


Yesterday, the New Haven Register had a nice article about the new Physician-in-Chief, Dr. Thomas Lynch. You'd certainly expect him to be at the forefront of cancer care, and he is. He's pushing two very important, realted things:


First, he wants to see more cancer patients participating in clinical trials. This is especially important for lymphoma patients -- there are so many promising lymphoma drugs in the pipeline that need to be tested on actual patients. Lynch says that only 3% of cancer patients participate in trials now; he'd like to see that go up to 20%. Participation in clinical trials was apparently a big issue at the Lymphoma and Myeloma International Conference this past weekend in New York (I'm looking for some abstracts from L & M, and I'll try to share some soon.)


The other thing that Dr. Lynch is pushing is Personalization, which is something that makes me happy. He thinks clinical trials and personalization strategies are connected: more people may participate in trials if they have a better understanding of their own cancer's micro-environment. He wants to have all patients at Smilow undergo this kind of testing to have that information available. That should make it easier to match patients with treatments still in trial.


I like the approach. The are already some cancers that use that kind of information to determine whether a treatment is likely to work before it is even given. Saves lots of time, money, and pain for everyone involved.

I'm officially a patient at Yale, having seen Dr. C there a long time ago, so I guess that means I'm a patient at Smilow, too. I'd be happy to know more about my own micro-environment.

In the meantime, Yale is one of the top 20 cancer hospitals in the country, and Smilow might actually move them up a little on the list. I'm in a good place....