By Tim Bonfield
The Cincinnati Enquirer

CORRYVILLE - A $115 million research tower to be built at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center could improve lives worldwide by speeding the movement of medical discoveries from the lab to patients who need the help.

It also will make Cincinnati Children's the nation's biggest pediatric research center, while potentially adding more than 1,000 jobs to the city.

Click to view an informational PDF file (332k) showing details about the proposed project.

The massive project, announced Monday, calls for building an 11-story, 363,000-square-foot tower along Albert Sabin Way on a site occupied by the oldest remaining portion of Children's Hospital. Its key occupant will be a new Center for Computational Medicine that will use high-powered computers to study genetic causes - and potential cures - for a range of diseases.

Demolition of the older building already has begun. Construction of the new tower will start within six months, with completion projected for 2007.

The new tower will increase overall research space by about 70 percent, to 880,500 square feet. That in turn will make room to recruit another 160 faculty researchers to Cincinnati Children's during the next eight years - an increase of about 50 percent.

And since each researcher typically has a support staff of five to seven people, adding 160 top scientists could translate into roughly 900 to 1,300 new jobs for the city.

Beyond the statistics, James Anderson, president and chief executive of Cincinnati Children's, said the tower is a symbol of the institution's larger mission of becoming a national leader in transforming patient care.

"It is a pivotal project in our history," Anderson said.

The research tower in Cincinnati reflects the worldwide explosion of research flowing from the Human Genome Project, which was substantially completed four years ago and defined all 3.1 billion base pairs of DNA making up the human genetic code.

Now, medical centers everywhere are pumping billions into vastly upgraded computer equipment and legions of experts in genetics, cell biology, bioinformatics and other fields.

The hope: to usher in a new era of medical advances.

Changing health care

The new research tower at Cincinnati Children's will be home to the Center for Computational Medicine - a far-reaching program that won more than $25 million in state grants last fall from Ohio's Third Frontier Project.

"Computational medicine will change the future of health-care delivery," says Dr. Thomas Boat, director of the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Research Foundation.

Not only will the computational center serve numerous projects at Cincinnati Children's, it will supply data to adult-medicine researchers at the University of Cincinnati, to Wright State University and to several corporate partners - including Procter & Gamble.

Thanks to the development of DNA microarrays and computer systems powerful enough to analyze thousands of genes at once, new doors are opening to the causes - and potential cures - for all manner of human disease.

As scientists learn how differing combinations of genes make people more or less likely to contract illnesses, they hope to spot new ways to treat diseases from heart disease to cancer to juvenile arthritis.

Someday, the ability to rapidly crunch genetic data will allow doctors to check in advance whether a person is likely to benefit from a medication or suffer a serious side effect.

And someday, this explosion in genetic research may allow people to start treatments as children to prevent diseases that typically strike only during adulthood.

Discoveries in Cincinnati most likely will be licensed to pharmaceutical companies, which in turn will produce medications to be marketed worldwide.

"Much of the research we're doing will apply to adults, not just to children," said Dr. David Williams, director of experimental hematology at Cincinnati Children's. "If we can intervene early enough, we can potentially prevent the development of some adult diseases by applying treatments during childhood."

Translational research

The soaring hopes of genetic research also place a premium on a down-to-earth concept called translational research. That's the process of moving an interesting idea from the gene labs into actual treatments that benefit people.

A priority for Cincinnati Children's has been to speed up that process. So, much of the work in the new building will be about just that.

The tower offers space for more people to test more products in human cell cultures and in animals. Officials also expect to launch many more "Phase I" human clinical trials - the first of a three-stage process for approving new drugs, during which the first few dozen people actually take an experimental medication.

Exactly which researchers will occupy the new building hasn't been decided. Some of the initial projects in the new tower probably will focus on common health problems like asthma and juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. Others may focus on uncommon problems such as Fanconi anemia, an inherited type of bone marrow disease, Williams said.

Even the design of the new building is intended to speed up translational research.

In several areas, researchers from differing fields of expertise will be grouped together to work on common projects. The idea is to spark as many formal and informal collaborations as possible.

"This approach should help Children's Hospital become very competitive (in seeking federal research grants) because this is how the NIH wants to fund projects," Williams said.

Research arms race

At $57 million a year, Cincinnati Children's already ranks third among pediatric centers in terms of research grants from the National Institutes of Health - the No. 1 source of medical research funding.

But with the new project, it will have the most room to grow.

The $115 million project in Cincinnati leapfrogs recent expansions at two other top pediatric centers.

In 2001, the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia announced a $57 million, 10-story addition to its Abramson Pediatric Research Center. With that project, the Philadelphia center's total research space grew to about 600,000 square feet.

Then in October 2003, Children's Hospital Boston opened a $130 million, 12-story tower that brought its total research space to about 653,000 square feet.

In Boston, like Cincinnati, officials rave about open labs and common areas designed to foster collaborations.

"The science of biology and medicine is becoming more horizontal," said Bruce Zetter, vice president of research for Boston Children's, last fall when that hospital's expansion was announced.

And in Boston, like Cincinnati, officials predict their new building will attract hundreds of researchers who will bring with them millions in research grants.

As the thinking goes: Whoever has the hottest facilities stands the best chance of attracting the brightest minds.

"It is something of an arms race. It's a race for researchers," said Cincinnati's Williams.

Children's recent research awards

• $25.2 million from Ohio's Third Frontier Project to establish a regional Center for Computational Medicine. Unlike federal grants that are designed to pay for researchers, some of this money can be used for equipment and buildings.

• $17.3 million from the National Institute for Neurologic Disorders and Stroke to lead the nation's largest study of childhood epilepsy. The five-year study will involve more than 400 children to be treated at 20 medical centers nationwide.

• A $13 million, five-year grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to establish a research center to study the genetic causes of heart valve disease. Children's is one of four centers nationally to get grants from the Specialized Centers of Clinically Oriented Research program.

• $6.9 million from the National Institutes of Health to study gene expression patterns in juvenile rheumatoid arthritis.

• $6.6 million from the National Institute of Child Health and Development for a five-year study of the role of human milk in infant health and nutrition.

• $5.5 million from the National Institutes of Health for a five-year grant to establish the nation's first Rare Lung Disease Clinical Research Consortium. The University of Cincinnati Medical Center is a partner in this project.

• $2.59 million from the National Institute of Diabetes & Digestive & Kidney Diseases for a five-year grant to establish a digestive disease research center involving 27 scientists from several disciplines.

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E-mail tbonfield@enquirer.com