UC San Francisco unveils $135 million cancer research center
By Sandy Kleffman
Contra Costa Times
Posted: 06/02/2009 09:22:17 PM PDT
Updated: 06/03/2009 06:27:16 AM PDT
SAN FRANCISCO — UC San Francisco opened a new $135 million cancer research center Tuesday where scientists hope to develop promising therapies and find better ways to diagnose and prevent disease.
The five-story, 163,000-square-foot structure will more than double the amount of laboratory space devoted to cancer research at UCSF.
It will house 250 researchers working in 33 laboratories, and will eventually expand to 400 researchers.
Those who attended the grand opening of the Helen Diller Family Cancer Research Building got a sneak preview of the future of personalized medicine and what leading experts hope to accomplish in their battle against cancer.
"We are deeply grateful for giving us the opportunity to work under one roof, and my vow to you is that we're going to make an impact on this disease," said Dr. Mitchel Berger, director of the UCSF Brain Tumor Research Center.
Like many of the university's cancer specialists, those working on brain tumors have been separated in three buildings in various locations in San Francisco.
Bringing them together in one spot on the Mission Bay campus will enable them to work collaboratively with one another and the thriving biomedical community in the area, said Frank McCormick, director of the cancer center.
UCSF also plans to build a 289-bed medical center nearby that would open in 2014. It would include a cancer specialty hospital, as well as facilities devoted to women and children.
Having physicians working side-by-side with scientists and clinical researchers should help speed transforming laboratory findings into improved patient care, McCormick said.
The cancer center is named after Bay Area resident Helen Diller, who donated $35 million. All told, the university raised $81.5 million in private funding for the center and financed the rest with its own resources.
For the opening ceremonies, UCSF organized a panel discussion among experts, including J. Craig Venter, who led the team that sequenced the human genome.
Venter predicted that a time is coming when scientists will decode the genetic makeup of thousands of patients and use that information to make decisions about effective treatments, drugs and the proper dosages for each person.
"It's not surprising at all that all drugs don't work on everybody," he said, given how genetic makeup varies from person to person.
As an example of such personalized medicine, Dr. Susan Desmond-Hellmann cited Herceptin, a breast cancer drug. She led the team that helped bring Herceptin to market as the former president of product development at Genentech. She will soon become the new chancellor of UCSF, replacing Dr. J. Michael Bishop.
In the early 1990s, Desmond-Hellmann said, she knew that women who had breast cancer and a certain genetic makeup had a shortened life expectancy compared with other women with breast cancer. But she had no specialized treatments to offer them.
Herceptin has shown success by targeting the HER2 gene in these women. Scientists can now tell which women are likely to benefit from the drug and which are not, she said. Thus physicians can avoid giving the drug to everybody and having some suffer the side effects without receiving any benefit.
Genetic information could also help with prevention. If people know they have a makeup that increases their susceptibility to a certain kind of cancer, Venter said, there may be steps they can take to help prevent it. In the long run, he added, that could help control health care costs.
But as patients gain more knowledge, McCormick emphasized, health leaders will need to help them interpret what it all means and how they should respond.
"It's really awful to know you're at high risk of disease and there is nothing you can do about it," he said.
Reach Sandy Kleffman at 925-943-8249 or skleffman@bayareanewsgroup.com.
