Mayo's cancer research center on schedule

April, 07 2007
By Jeff Hansel

The Post-Bulletin

A new, multimillion-dollar cancer research center in Mayo Clinic's Gonda Building is on schedule for an early-summer opening.

The Schulze Center for Novel Therapeutics, funded by a $49 million gift from the Richard M. Schulze Family Foundation, has been under construction on the 19th floor of Gonda since early 2006.

"We're expecting actually to move in the end of May, beginning of June, and the builders are right on time," said Dr. Robert Diasio, director of Mayo's Comprehensive Cancer Center.

The cancer center includes Mayo's campuses in Rochester, Jacksonville and Arizona, making it the only three-site National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center in the nation.

Researchers specializing in molecular pharmacology, experimental therapeutics, medical oncology and pharmacogenomics will move to Gonda 19 from the Guggenheim Building.

"It'll free up space in the Guggenheim Building and allow additional investigators to be recruited, and at the same time, it'll bring all these investigators together that are doing similar research," Diasio said.

A key aspect of the Schulze Center's location is proximity to ongoing patient care and medical providers. It will help new ideas flow directly from doctors and nurses to researchers.

That's also part of the Therapeutic Center's design. Research labs were left open to allow researchers to bounce ideas off each other.

"It represents one of the newer concepts in laboratory design, where it's sort of an open laboratory without walls," Diasio said. At first it seems strange to researchers, he said, "because we're used to working in our little cubbyholes."

According to the Mayo employee newsletter "This Week at Mayo Clinic," the center's mission will be "to translate laboratory findings into new methods for treating cancer."

Richard Schulze's first wife, Sandra J. Schulze, died in 2001 of asbestos-related cancer called mesothelioma. The family's gift will fund two named professorships -- the Sandra J. Schulze Professor and the Richard M. Schulze Family Foundation Professor -- to recognize outstanding cancer researchers who are internationally recognized for their work.

Diasio said the first symposium funded by the Foundation gift will focus on pharmacogenomics, developing genetic tests to see which drugs do, or do not, work best for individual patients.

Schulze, the founder of electronics retail chain Best Buy, and his family have been good to Rochester. The foundation also gave a $2.5 million matching grant to the Hope Lodge, a home-away-from-home for patients undergoing cancer treatment at Mayo. That gift prompted enough donations to allow a $5 million doubling of the lodge, which should be completed and open by early summer.

SOURCE: Post Bulletin published Apr 7, 2007