One of the country’s preeminent cancer hospitals is establishing a treatment center in Brooklyn.
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, which is based in Manhattan but attracts patients from all over the world, will open an outpatient center at 557 Atlantic Ave., between Third and Fourth avenues, “sometime after Labor Day,” according to hospital spokesperson Chris Hickey.
The goal of the 7,745-square-foot, street level center is to make it easier for Brooklyn residents who are already patients at Sloan Kettering to get treatment, said Hickey. Approximately 15 percent of the hospital’s patients hail from the borough, she said.
The facility will limit itself to the delivery of chemotherapy, according to Hickey, who said that there would be no lab or pharmacy at the new borough location which, when fully operational, could handle “up to 30 patients a day.”
This is not the first time the cancer center has expanded beyond its Manhattan base.
However, said Hickey, the new Brooklyn satellite facility will be more limited in scope than more distant ones on Long Island and New Jersey, where newly diagnosed patients have access to a wide array of services.
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center — which is rated the number two cancer hospital in the U.S., by U.S. News & World Report, after M.D. Anderson in Houston — is the world’s largest and oldest private cancer treatment facility, according to the hospital’s Web site.