Prime medical facility takes shape in valley

Molly Ball

Thursday, Dec. 30, 2004 | 11:17 a.m.

The Nevada Cancer Institute is so far only a skeleton. But walking through it, you only need a little imagination to see the flesh on the bones.

Step through the bare concrete pillars in the L-shaped structure, and you can envision the soaring two-story, glass-fronted atrium that will welcome patients and researchers.

Walk through puddles of rainwater to a large vacant space at the back of the first floor, and imagine a speaker on an auditorium's stage, lecturing on medicine to an audience of students, patients or community members.

Head up to the third floor and you get the best mental picture of all: a row of 18 comfortable recliners where patients can relax while chemotherapy seeps into their bloodstreams. As they lean back, they take in a stunning vista of the Las Vegas Strip against the backdrop of majestic mountains.

Slowly but surely, the building intended to become Nevada's first nationally certified cancer research and treatment center is going up. Three weeks ago, it got a roof.

"The building is on time and on schedule," said Dr. Nicholas Vogelzang, the institute's director. "It should open in July."

Bringing Nevada's institute up to par with the nation's best will be a long, slow process, Vogelzang said. He likened it to building a baseball team: It takes more than just a few good players to compete with the Yankees.

The institute is filling its organizational chart with faculty members -- 10 so far, including Vogelzang, whose hiring was a major coup. Vogelzang was previously the head of the cancer research center at the University of Chicago.

By the time the three-story, 140,000-square-foot building is complete, Vogelzang said he hopes to have hired five to 10 more faculty members. The total size of the faculty will depend on the funding the institute gets from donations, government grants and corporate contracts.

About 140 staffers, from janitors to technicians to nurses, will also be needed once the facility opens.

The institute is funded with about $40 million in donations and a $50 million loan, helped by such only-in-Vegas fundraisers as a gala James Bond movie screening, an Eagles benefit concert and sales of a light-up miniature of the "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas" sign.

If the institute is unorthodox, it is also something of an underdog.

The major disadvantage the institute faces is the lack of a major academic medical center next door. The state's only medical school, the University of Nevada School of Medicine, is based in Reno but partners with Las Vegas hospitals for residencies.

The nation's largest and most prestigious cancer centers are academic: the University of Chicago Cancer Center has about 170 researchers, the Yale Cancer Center has 260 and the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center has more than 1,000. These institutes' affiliations with schools make a natural symbiosis.

So how do you compete with the Yankees when your payroll and media market are the size of the 51s'? You get creative.

The institute has the advantage of building quickly and from scratch, Vogelzang said, so it hopes to find niches in cancer research and care -- new research avenues or populations currently underserved. The institute can hopefully sneak into first place in these areas before the bigger players realize there's a race going on.

One such field is population science, the study of cancer prevention and survival. Population science focuses on what happens before and after a cancer diagnosis. It is a field of increasing importance now that scientists are learning more about cancer's causes, and now that more people go on to live long lives after successful cancer treatment.

Population science is one of the institute's four planned divisions, along with clinical science, basic science and drug development.

As Nevada's first cancer center, the institute also hopes to do well by doing good -- using Nevada's unique situation as a lens for research. For example, Nevadans' levels of lung and skin cancers are some of the nations' highest; researchers could gain insight into those diseases at the same time as they help the community.

Another example: Lung and skin cancer aside, Nevadans get cancer at about the same rates as other Americans, but they die of the disease more. Through a partnership with the Culinary Union, the institute hopes to study a large population of insured people to see what is killing them and how to stop it.

It will be a long, hard slog until a "critical mass" of faculty is amassed, making bunches of scattershot projects congeal into a reputation for specialized expertise. Vogelzang said the institute will simply keep plugging away, bringing in as many doctors as it can afford and entice, one at a time.

Another limitation will be space. The institute's Justine Harrison laughed when she remembered that the original plan was a "fabulous 30,000-square-foot building."

Subsequent plans for the enlarged building called for suites of executive offices and rental space for outside doctors' offices. But those had to go, too, and now the center's administration is slated to stay where it is, in an office park a couple of miles away.

It is mostly huge electronics that take up all that space, from enormous magnetic imaging devices to radiation machines that must be encased in lead-lined rooms to banks of servers for the institute's paperless record-keeping.

The building isn't finished, and it's already full.

"We are going to need more space, I can see it," Vogelzang said. While the institute is currently barreling along at a heady pace, "we're going to slow down at some point, and the first thing we'll probably bump into is restrictions in lab space," he said.

That, of course, will be a good problem to have. It will mean the institute is growing.

"Getting the building up is just the first step," Vogelzang said. Comparing the institute project to climbing a mountain, he said, "it's like the base camp -- climbing Everest is not going to happen overnight."