About fifteen hundred Americans die of cancer every day.

Georgia has been hit especially hard with breast, cervical, prostate, lung, and colon cancers, particularly among its poor and minority residents. But the state remains the largest in the nation without a federal cancer center.

Emory’s Winship Cancer Institute (WCI) is aiming to be the first.

This summer, the institute moved into a state-of-the-art, $75-million building on Uppergate Drive behind Emory Clinic A. The first four levels provide patient care and services; the top three floors are dedicated to research.

The National Cancer Institute, which disperses federal funds for cancer research, turned down Emory’s initial request to become a comprehensive cancer center in 1996.

With subsequent improvements–including the WCI’s new home, an expanded mission that includes prevention and education, dozens of additional faculty, and a 400 percent jump in federal grants in the past three years–the University is moving confidently toward a second attempt.

So far, signs are promising: in September, Emory received a five-year, $1.9 million federal planning grant, which helps promising cancer centers strengthen their research programs.

This success is due, in part, to Jonathan Simons, formerly a prostate cancer researcher at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, who took the helm of the WCI in 2001.

Simons recruited prestigious researchers and clinicians to Emory from the best-known cancer facilities in the country–M.D. Anderson at the University of Texas, the University of Virginia, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the National Cancer Institute. The scholars were wooed with support from the Georgia Cancer Coalition, a $1 billion public-private effort to boost cancer research financed by the state’s tobacco settlement funds, private money, and federal grants.

The new building in which these researchers will work is a “discovery accelerator,” says Simons, where all of the WCI’s collective brain power can mingle. Each of the research floors has an open lab as long as a football field in the center, surrounded by faculty offices. Translational research–taking ideas from the drawing board to the patients’ bedside–is what the new facility is all about.

The WCI brings clinical services under one roof as well: radiation oncology and imaging, bone marrow transplant clinic, ambulatory infusion center, breast imaging center, medical and surgical oncology department and exam rooms. There is also a cafe, counseling center, and chapel.

“We have designed the new Winship Cancer Institute as a pavilion,” says Simons, “in which patients with cancer, their families, physicians, nurses, and researchers are all brought together under one roof.”

The WCI was established in 1937 with a gift from Robert W. Woodruff, and is made up of more than two hundred Emory School of Medicine faculty. WCI researchers have been awarded several substantial grants recently, the largest of which was $10 million from the Department of Defense to fund a prostate cancer research consortium. Through Web-based videoconferencing and data sharing technologies, investigators from thirteen universities in eight states will work together “as if they were all in one giant laboratory,” says Simons.

Emory and the WCI are involved in several other efforts to improve treatment and decrease cancer rates in Georgia. In March, the state’s first Cancer Center for Excellence opened a $31.3 million facility on two remodeled floors of Grady Memorial Hospital in downtown Atlanta, staffed largely by Emory doctors and researchers. The Georgia Cancer Coalition donated $28 million toward creating the center, and the Avon Foundation donated $3 million toward its breast health system.

As the first of four regional cancer centers planned by the Georgia Cancer Coalition, the center will strive to lower the disproportionate number of cancer deaths among African Americans and the poor.

“I believe that a big part of the reason these disparities exist is in the quality of care received,” says Otis Brawley, director of the Grady cancer center and associate director for cancer control at the WCI. “We’re trying to find the best way to provide good, adequate care to a population that has not received it in the past. We are trying to answer some basic questions that have gone unanswered for too long.”

Michael M.E. Johns, executive vice president for health affairs and director of the Woodruff Health Sciences Center, says Georgia clearly needed a stellar cancer research and treatment center, and he is gratified that one now exists at Emory.

“The opening of the new Winship Cancer Institute building is a very special moment for Emory, for everyone involved, and for our patients,” Johns says. “This building is a symbol for us–it represents the long road we took to arrive here, and the long road ahead of us. Here, the patient is really at the center of our efforts.”–M.J.L.