Astera started its research program in November 2019. In the beginning, their team had one dedicated staff member, Percy Yeung, with two clinical trials. However, under Dr. Bruno Fang’s guidance and support from our providers and clinic staff, we are now offering over 25 clinical trials to our patients with four dedicated staff members.
Although interventional therapy is the ultimate way to help a patient’s health, research helps in many different ways. Similar to Academic institutes, the Astera research department collaborates with biotech and pharmaceutical companies to improve drug development and offers a variety of studies to patients. The key difference from Academic Institutes, is Astera offers clinical trials in an outpatient setting with its compassionate care team every step of the way. Astera has over 25 clinical trials for different cancers, including bladder, breast, head & neck, lung, pancreatic, prostate, DLBCL, Follicular Lymphoma, and multiple myeloma. In addition, Astera offers a non-cancer trial for a new drug for Central Venous Access Device (CVAD) and some procured studies providing free diagnosis tests.
Meet Astera’s Research Team:
Percy Yeung, Ph.D., CCRP, Clinical Research Director
Dr. Yeung is working closely with Dr. Fang and other Investigators on meeting with pharmaceutical companies and helping them on initiating new trials. Dr. Yeung also manages the research team on delivering state-of-the-art study patient care.
• Carina Cedeno, Clinical Research Coordinator
• Stephanie Marks, Clinical Research Coordinator
• Stephanie Ortiz, Research Coordinator
Astera provides patients with access to clinical trials at every site. However, Astera conducts all study treatments in Astera’s East Brunswick and Monroe offices. The East Brunswick office has research-dedicated equipment, including centrifuge and freezers, which help the research team process biological samples for research. The pharmacy hub is also located in the East Brunswick office. The pharmacists help oversee research medicine management.
The Monroe office is responsible for radiation and nuclear medicine treatment. The radiation oncologists deliver radiation treatment using our top-of-the-line machine and nuclear medicine treatment in our fully-equipped RAM-specific treatment room.
All of Astera’s doctors play an important role as investigators in the clinical trials, and every office supports non-treatment activity. As a result, patients can participate in clinical trials while receiving care from their primary doctors.
Astera’s leadership is passionate about bringing new and innovative therapy to community-based settings. Together with its radiation oncology department, they provide a nuclear medicine and wearable device therapy trial. PSMA-Lutate is available to prostate cancer patients.
CAR T therapy has been limited to hospital inpatient treatment for many years. Astera is proud to be participating in the first outpatient setting CAR T trial and provided CAR T-cell therapy as one of the first true outpatient clinics. Astera continues to look for other cutting-edge trials and will be the only institute around to offer Natural Killer (NK) cell therapy to Pancreatic cancer patients.