Director named for new cancer institute

Thursday, Dec. 18, 2003 | 11:04 a.m.

Dr. Nicholas Vogelzang has spent more than two decades battling cancer, both professionally as a prominent researcher and personally as a survivor of Hodgkin's disease.

Starting Jan. 5 he will put that experience to work as he takes the helm of the Nevada Cancer Institute, President Heather Murren announced Tuesday.

The infant institute is the brainchild of Murren and her husband, James, the president, chief financial officer and treasurer of MGM MIRAGE. The Murrens broke ground on the facility in May and hope to open the three-story, 140,000-plus-square-foot facility for patient care and research in early 2005.

Heather Murren said the institute selected Vogelzang from 20 candidates nominated by National Cancer Institute directors from across the country.

"(Vogelzang) was head and shoulders above the pack of being the perfect person for the institution, and luckily he saw that he was was head and shoulders above the pack and agreed to take the position," Murren said.

"This is an enormous coup for this state and this effort, and he is going to make an enormous contribution to moving us forward."

Murren said Vogelzang's prominence will add credibility to the state and the institute's cancer research programs. Vogelzang will be responsible for getting the institute certified by the National Cancer Institute.

Vogelzang, formerly the director of the nationally recognized University of Chicago Cancer Research Center, said he is already working on designing and recruiting leaders for each of the institute's proposed research programs in both cancer treatment and prevention.

"I want to stay focused on cancer, that's my goal," Vogelzang said over the phone Tuesday, just before giving a lecture on mesothelioma, or abestos-related cancer, one of his research specialties.

Vogelzang, 54, said his own brush with Hodgkin's disease in 1984 increased his concern for cancer patients.

"I was a cancer researcher before I got Hodgkin's disease, but it gives me a substantial appreciation of the burden cancer patients carry," Vogelzang said. "Of what it feels like when you are first diagnosed, then undergo treatment and even when you are cured."

Murren agreed, noting that Vogelzang's personal experience helps him to treat the whole person and not just the symptoms of cancer.

When you have experienced cancer yourself, "you are much more compassionate, you get it, you understand how scary it is," Murren said.

Cancer research, which includes basic, clinical and population or health-outcome science, has greatly increased the percentage of survivors, Vogelzang said.

"I know I am one of the fortunate ones, but somewhere between 50 to 60 percent of all patients diagnosed with cancer today should expect to be cured. That's a substantial number. In the 1950s it was more like 25 percent."

Coming to the Nevada Career Institute will allow Vogelzang to stay involved in all aspects of cancer research, he said. After 22 years at the University of Chicago, he said the only way he could move up was as an academic dean, a role that would remove him from research.

Vogelzang said he hopes to have four to eight research subsections, particularly in drug development, immunology, imaging and either lung cancer or all chest cancers, depending on what "resources we can marshal."

The Nevada institute will be modeled after National Cancer Institutes in Philadelphia and Florida, Vogelzang said.

He said his first step after arriving in Las Vegas will be to meet with oncology doctors here.

"You have some really wonderful oncology people in the valley," Vogelzang said. "I want to meet with them and find out how I can complement their activities and build on their activities."

In the long term, Vogelzang said he plans to develop an endowment for the organization and work toward creating a biotechnological campus in Las Vegas with other cancer researchers and drug developers.

"I want to show the community that we will be creating an institution that will long outlast me," Vogelzang said.

Vogelzang has 30 different projects and grants for cancer research right now, many of which he said he plans to bring with him to Las Vegas. His most recent accomplishment was a clinical trial for Alimta, a new drug expected to be approved by the Federal Drug Administration soon for use on mesothelioma patients based on the positive outcomes of the drug in Vogelzang's study.

He is also a specialist in genitourinary malignancies and prostate cancer, as well as new therapies for metastatic kidney cancer. A graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago Medical School, Vogelzang was once the head of the American Cancer Society in Illinois.