Stony Brook University doctors and hospital leaders Monday unveiled a new 6,000-square-foot facility that will allow Long Islanders to participate in clinical trials to combat Alzheimer’s, cancer and an array of other diseases.
The new clinical trials unit in Commack will begin screening patients and administer cutting-edge treatments in the coming weeks, said Dr. Susan Hedayati, vice dean for research in the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University.
The facility, in a building on Commack Road that already houses other Stony Brook Medicine offices, will bring “access to clinical trials closer to where people live and work,” Dr. William Wertheim, executive vice president of Stony Brook Medicine, said Monday before a ceremonial ribbon cutting. Patients voluntarily sign up for such trials, he added, “in the hope their participation will support their healing and make a difference for others.”
The health care network’s latest expansion is only its second facility capable of administering experimental chemotherapy drugs, according to Hedayati. The new clinical trials unit follows a much smaller one in East Setauket and will precede an even larger one planned in the coming years for Stony Brook’s Lake Grove facility at Smith Haven Mall, according to Dr. Todd Griffin, vice dean for clinical affairs.
Sensors underneath a raised track in a new Stony Brook Medicine clinical trials unit in Commack can measure brain functions. Credit: Rick Kopstein
‘An outreach area’
With the new facility, Stony Brook hopes to attract more patients, faculty and sponsors for clinical trials, Hedayati said. Commack was chosen not only for its central position on Long Island, but the fact that research efforts will take place under the same roof as Stony Brook Medicine’s Advanced Specialty Care facility, home to specialties that includes the World Trade Center Health and Wellness Program.
“This is in an outreach area; we have our specialty advanced care … ranging from infectious disease, family practice, cardiology,” Hedayati said.
The Commack facility includes a cardiopulmonary exercise room to measure “pulmonary fitness and oxygenation during exercise,” a room for outpatient procedures, including breast biopsies, a wet lab, a three-bay infusion suite for chemotherapeutic trials and a dozen exam and consultation rooms, Hedayati said. This infrastructure will allow Stony Brook to enlist people of all ages for clinical trials to treat infectious, kidney, lung and neurological diseases and mental illness.
“We’re opening doors to discovery and to hope,” Wertheim said. “This space represents the bridge between groundbreaking research that we do in the laboratory, and the patients and the families that we serve every day right here in our communities.”
Stony Brook Medicine’s new clinical trials unit is housed in a building at 500 Commack Road in Commack, NY on Nov. 10, 2025. Credit: Rick Kopstein
Spaces for Alzheimer’s work
The new Commack facility also includes two spaces — a floor maze and a large single-lane walking track embedded with pressure sensors — dedicated to detecting early signs of Alzheimer’s, according to Dr. Joe Verghese, chair of the department of neurology at Stony Brook Medicine, whom Hedayati described as the new facility’s “anchor tenant.”
“What we can do here is identify certain gate patterns and brain patterns that predict falls,” to which people with Alzheimer’s are more prone, Verghese said, standing next to the massive track. Patients will wear a cap outfitted with sensors to detect brain activity while the sensors beneath their feet provide “about 100 different variables about … their walking patterns,” he added.
Stony Brook has been running a clinical trial for an orally administered drug that targets one of the two proteins in the brain associated with Alzheimer’s, according to Dr. Nikhil Palekar, director of the Stony Brook Center of Excellence for Alzheimer’s Disease. Next spring, the Commack facility will begin hosting a trial for another drug that targets the second protein.
Over many years, the work done with patients wearing electrodes and walking a path with sensors in Commack could be “distilled down to an even simpler test” done in a primary care physician’s office, Verghese said. The folks who seek specialists and sign up for clinical trials are “the tip of the iceberg.”
“This is important to understanding, but eventually all of that has to be translated to clinical care,” Verghese said of the work done in Commack. “If it didn’t, I would be very unsatisfied at the end of my career that it led to some interesting findings, but it didn’t have an impact on patient care.”
Some features of the new unitA cardiopulmonary exercise roomA room for outpatient procedures A three-bay infusion suite for chemotherapeutic trialsA dozen exam and consultation roomsSpaces dedicated to detecting the early signs of Alzheimer’s
Nicholas Grasso covers breaking news for Newsday. A Long Island native, he previously worked at several community newspapers and lifestyle magazines based on the East End.