Open, collaborative spaces inside the
Medical College of Wisconsin’s Center for Cancer Discovery will bring together the institution’s cancer research programs in one shared facility.
The idea is to spark greater innovation that will advance discoveries and save lives. That increased synergy is just one aspect of the new $153 million facility — set to open in August — that excites
Gustavo Leone, director of the MCW Cancer Center, senior associate dean of cancer research and professor of biochemistry.
MCW’s cancer research programs are currently spread across multiple buildings but once unified inside the new five-story, 161,000-square-foot Center for Cancer Discovery, researchers who may not have interacted before will have opportunities to collaborate and share ideas.
“When they’re waiting for the elevators, somebody comes by and they have a shared interest in some scientific question, and they talk about it — that might have not happened anywhere else,” Leone said.
Leone, standing in a hallway near a set of elevators on the facility’s first floor, gestured to that space where researchers will be able to connect.
“The discovery could be done right here, that changes somebody’s life, right there, and saves that life and their families and ramifications of that,” Leone said. “That is fundamentally what we’re trying to do.”
The Center for Cancer Discovery is located at the Milwaukee Regional Medical Center campus in Wauwatosa and
construction began in 2022. Upon completion, it will be the first and only cancer-centered research facility in eastern Wisconsin. MCW received $10 million in state funding for the project.
The Center for Cancer Discovery has 53 research laboratory spaces and 59 offices for investigators leading cancer research studies.
The first floor of the cancer research center also houses the BioHub, which is a dedicated space for supporting investigator-led start-ups focused on innovative cancer therapeutics.
“This space is to actualize the taking ideas and discoveries that have commercial value and implementing it,” Leone said.
Down the hall from the BioHub will eventually be a bridge to connect the Center for Cancer Discovery to the Versiti Blood Research Institute. The bridge will be added as part of Versiti’s 79,000-square-foot expansion project.
The Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research, headquartered at MCW, will also reside on the first floor of the new facility.
The first floor, largely comprised of shared resources, is a technology corridor “rich in high price technology that allows us to do phenomenal science,” Leone said.
The facility will house six shared resources with state-of-the-art equipment to study cancer, including through biostatistics, geospatial epidemiology and outcomes, cell therapy, structural biology, translational metabolomics, as well as biorepository and tissue analytics.
All floors of the Center for Cancer Discovery are also connected to MCW’s Translational Biomedical Research Center. The new facility will be MCW’s first research building to have main doors that are open to the public, and that community openness is significant, Leone said.
“There’s nothing mysterious that we’re doing here,” Leone said. “We welcome the community. They can come and meet and see for themselves what their tax dollars are going to, or fundraising or philanthropy.”
In January, MCW applied for the Center for Cancer Discovery to be designated by the National Cancer Institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health. MCW will be notified in the fall whether it will receive the designation, Leone said, and it’s unlikely for a center to be designated upon its first application.
Th NCI designation would allow MCW to “maximize our resources,” Leone said. It would allow MCW to become eligible for certain federal grants. The “prestige” of the designation would also attract more scientists and faculty, Leone said.
MCW will start to move into the Center for Cancer Discover in mid-August and continue through October.
“The best of care is here,” Leone said. “The best of care is always underpinned by research.”
[gallery size="meccarouselthumb" td_select_gallery_slide="slide" ids="617011,617022,617021,617009,617010,617023,617024,617012,617014,617015,617016,617019,617017,617013,617008,617007,617018"]
