Cincinnati Children's Announces New Research Building
Unique Design Intended to Foster Collaboration and Improve Child Health
Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center today announced that it will build a new, 11-story research facility on its main campus.
The new building will have 33,000 square feet of space on each floor and 363,000 total square feet. It will house laboratories, other special research facilities, clinical faculty offices and the Center for Computational Medicine, which was funded last fall with a grant of $25.2 million from the state of Ohio's Third Frontier Project. When the building is completed in 2007, Cincinnati Children's will have 880,500 square feet of research space on its main campus.
"This new facility will provide the lab and office space we need to expand our research programs and recruit new clinical faculty," says James M. Anderson, president and CEO of Cincinnati Children's. "It is a pivotal project in our history."
The research building will be designed to foster collaboration among various scientific disciplines. Groups will be clustered geographically by broad, overlapping interests and themes rather than by academic department or division. For example, researchers from the divisions of immunology and molecular immunology may share space with scientists from hematology / oncology, allergy, rheumatology and other divisions who study the immune system or whose diseases have an important immune component. In the past, divisions and departments would reside in self-contained "silos."
"The hope is that geographical clustering will increase collaborative interactions among faculty in different divisions and departments as well as clinical and basic scientists," says David Williams, MD, director of Experimental Hematology at Cincinnati Children's. "This innovative design will provide a fertile, synergistic environment that fosters increased productivity, increases our National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant funding and enables Cincinnati Children's to achieve its mission of being the leader in improving child health. The design process included many hours of work by a dedicated group of faculty leaders and input from all areas of the research and clinical operations of our institution."
In 2003, the NIH proposed a roadmap that requires "collaborative efforts from individuals with different training and expertise in order for the potential benefits to health and medical care to come to fruition." Cincinnati Children's, however, has been a step ahead of the NIH in this endeavor -- a step that has allowed Cincinnati Children's to win many large NIH grants that are driving translational research (research that can be taken from the laboratory bench to the bedside).
For example, Cincinnati Children's recently earned a $6.9 million program project grant from the NIH to examine gene expression patterns in pediatric rheumatic diseases, such as juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. By using DNA microarrays, also known as gene chips, researchers will be able to analyze thousands of genes in the blood, fluids and tissues of children newly diagnosed with various types of pediatric rheumatic diseases and related immune disorders.
Identifying gene expression patterns -- genes that are activated during disease -- for different types of childhood arthritis will help to improve diagnosis and to predict disease severity for affected children.
In the future, translational research will be characterized by analysis using research and tools from the fields of genetics, systems biology and information and computer sciences, which will result in fundamental discoveries about diseases that affect children and adults. Centers such as the Center for Computational Medicine will lead to new and better treatments -- not only to cure diseases but also to prevent them.
"Computational medicine will change the future of health care delivery by predicting risks for common diseases and assisting with devising earlier and better treatments as well as preventive strategies for each patient," says Tom Boat, MD, chairman of Pediatrics and director of the Cincinnati Children's Research Foundation. "This personalized, predictive approach to care represents a potentially powerful tool for achieving better health for children and adults. The Center will be a catalyst for commercialization of innovations that fully integrate genetic and genomic information into clinical medicine."
The capital cost of the project is approximately $115 million and will be financed through a combination of debt, fundraising and operating capital. Construction will begin this summer. The design team includes GBBN Architects, Messer Construction, Fosdick & Hilmer, Inc. and THP Ltd., Inc.
Contact Information
Jim Feuer, 513-636-4656,
jim.feuer@cchmc.org
