U.Va. opens $70.7 million facility for cancer research

The University of Virginia School of Medicine opened a $70.7 million facility yesterday that it hopes will lead to advances in cancer research.

The Carter-Harrison Research Building will allow University of Virginia School of Medicine researchers in fields such as immunology to translate their discoveries in the lab to improvements in immune therapy for cancer.

"[The Carter-Harrison Research Building] supports our best resources -- our people," said Dr. Steven DeKosky, vice president and dean of the school of medicine and international leader in Alzheimer's disease research.

Private donations from the Beirne B. Carter Foundation and the Harrison Family Foundation kick-started development on the building. Once planning began, the project was included in a 2002 bond referendum that passed by nearly 84 percent and raised $24 million.

The new facility is "enormously valuable" to the medical school for attracting top researchers away from competitors such as Johns Hopkins University, Duke University and Harvard University, according to DeKosky, who was recently featured in an HBO documentary called "The Alzheimer's Project."

One researcher already has come to U.Va. because of the new building. Dr. Paula Fracasso, deputy director of the cancer center, said she came from Washington University in St. Louis because the entire basement of the building is home to the Women's Oncology Group, which studies breast cancer and cancers of the cervix, uterus and ovaries.

"One of the reasons I was so excited to come to U.Va. was because of women's [cancer] research opportunity here," Fracasso said.

An immunology theme is seen throughout the building, said Dr. William Petri Jr., chief of the division of infectious diseases. Each floor is home to a different area of medical research. The common thread of immunology brings these separate departments together, according to Petri.

Members of his research team have been in the building for a week, and they're excited by the opportunity to collaborate with specialists in different areas and hope to use others expertise to further their own research, Petri said.

"If you can get a cancer biologist talking with an immunologist, great things happen," Petri said.

The fourth floor houses the Beirne B. Carter Center for Immunology Research, which will focus study on host immune response to tumors and the regulation of programmed cell death that is associated with cancer cell growth and HIV infection.

Petri's department of infectious diseases shares part of the third floor with investigators from the Beirne center, whose research complements infectious disease research. Infectious-disease researchers have the second floor to themselves. The researchers on that floor use funding from a $16.8 million annual grant to perform studies relating to biodefense and global health, among other areas.

"This is the best lab space I've seen anywhere," Petri said.

Jason Baraj is a staff writer for the Charlottesville Daily Progress.