Chapter 15: The Global Programs and Research Park
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Description
Dr. Mendelsohn begins this section by briefly describing his global program designed to foster training and research exchange with other cancer institutes around the world. His explains that his goal was to strengthen MD Anderson’s global presence and there is no question that sister institutions abroad helped increase the institution’s name recognition, though international traffic to MD Anderson dropped after 9/11. Dr. Mendelsohn next talks about the expansion of South Campus, or Research Park, on one hundred acres of land owned by the Health Science Center. He sketches the sequence of buildings constructed, noting that there was no master plan, but a plan evolved, and Dr. Margaret Kripke negotiated many of the details. Dr. Mendelsohn then explains that he had envisioned that Research Park might serve as the hub of a new “Silicon Valley” of biotech companies around MD Anderson. He then sketches the kinds of relationships that could be forged between MD Anderson and biotech companies.
Identifier
MendelsohnJ_02_20120928_C15
Publication Date
9-28-2012
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
John Mendelsohn, MD, Oral History Interview, September 28, 2012
Topics Covered
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center - Building the Institution The AdministratorBeyond the InstitutionThe Business of MD AndersonThe MD Anderson Brand, ReputationBuilding/Transforming the InstitutionProfessional Practice The Professional at WorkCharacter, Values, BeliefsThe Business of MD AndersonIndustry PartnershipsProfessional Practice The Professional at WorkTechnology and R&DBusiness of ResearchEthicsOn Pharmaceutical Companies and Industry
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
How did you go about building on that new national and international attention that the Bushes enabled MD Anderson to have?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
They give a party every year in Kennebunkport and invited potential thought leaders and donors who we wanted to attract to MD Anderson to come. I’m not bashful. I enjoy meeting people. We reached out and met a lot of people from many cities, many of whom joined the board and are still friends of mine. In parallel, our advertising went national, a bit; remember, we had a small budget.
We hired a firm in New York to help us plan introducing ourselves to the media capital, which happens to be there. Wonderful people. It was arranged that I would have interviews at Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. We got our message out about translational research. I got this diagram out. I got our vision out. We began to be ranked number 1 cancer center, so people were more likely to think, “Well, we better listen to them.” I started an effort, which I called Mendelsohn’s Folly at first, which was a global program. We had experiences with a small cancer center in Spain, which would take hours to explain, but it was with good intentions. It was with total undercapitalization and naïve planning and the 1st document I signed here was the plan for this, which had been put together prior to my arrival.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
You signed this in 1996?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
Yes. This had been planned prior to my arrival, but I agreed to it. The board told me it was a good plan. I think Red McCombs was involved in some of the planning. I flew over there, and I learned a lot. I learned how to start a cancer center in a foreign country, which came in handy later. We developed some interactions abroad, and then we started a program called MD Anderson Global where we, in a concerted way, tried to develop formal relationships with some cancer centers around the world, at first mainly oriented toward training in clinical care delivery and exchange in research. There were many people that said, “This is crazy. Let’s stick to our home base here on Holcombe Boulevard. Why should we spend the time? Our professors are flying across the ocean to go to these meetings. They could be treating patients here and doing their research here.” There was a pushback by a lot of the leading thinkers here.
My attitude was the same as at that first meeting with the clinical faculty. You want to be the number 1 cancer center? We’ve got to see patients up front, even when you think there’s a high likelihood they’ll never be on any of your clinical research protocols. We want everybody to feel this is the best place to come. If you want to be the best cancer center in the world, you’ve got to be acknowledged that way around the world, and I worked hard on it. We developed these relationships. I went to a lot of conferences and signed a lot of agreements, and some of them have turned out to be very exciting in terms of research. Some of them have been modest, but there’s no question in my mind that the MD Anderson of today is partly a result of this program, which has expanded to include true affiliations in clinical care here and abroad. We speak over 60 languages, and we have scientists and clinicians here from around the world. We’re recognized all over the world now as a great cancer center and arguably as the number 1 cancer center. If you go to China, you go to India, you go to the Middle East, you go to Brazil, you go to Mexico, there are a lot of people that are aware that MD Anderson is on the planet and that we’re very good, and many of them will come here. The international traffic in this country and in the field of medicine went down after 9/11 because it was so hard to get visas. Everybody was worried about sneaking in trouble. The global effort continues, and Dr. DePinho is very supportive of it.
The original question was, how did we market and brand MD Anderson? It’s partly through the people on our board. It’s partly through marketing, in the literal sense. It’s partly by meeting with newspapers and thought leaders in New York and all over the country, and it’s by creating a world presence for ourselves. Many of the major cancer centers in the world feel a relationship with us and have a plaque on the wall saying, “We are a sister institution of MD Anderson.” All of these things together, I think, fed into each other. And, most importantly, we continue to give fabulous care.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What are some of the really productive collaborations with overseas institutions?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
An example would be with the DKFZ, which is a German cancer center in Heidelberg. I developed a wonderful friendship with the director of that cancer center. We started talking about collaborations, and they’re terrific in a number of areas. One of them, for example, is in the physics of radiotherapy and radiology. They have some of the best programs in the world, and we’ve got some nice collaborations going on with them that feed into our proton therapy program and into our medical physics program. For a while we had some very good collaboration in Great Britain on drug development. They’re not as strong as they were a few years ago. We have a very interesting set of collaborations going on in China looking at traditional medicine and fitting in nicely with our integrated medicine program. Lorenzo Cohen actually went on sabbatical for 6 months over there. I think we helped develop that. He went to institutions where the director said, “Oh, Yes. We have an agreement with MD Anderson. We’re glad to welcome you.” There are many other examples like that. Those are the first ones that come to mind. Talk to Oliver Bogler. He puts a book out listing about 30 of them.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Shifting gears a little bit, I’m looking at the south campus research initiative, talking a little bit more in detail about the south campus and planning all of that. Of course, we’ve addressed that with talking about your chart here, but I’m wondering about the actual process of getting that started, getting that off the ground.
John Mendelsohn, MD:
Initially, it was basically taking over 100 acres of UT land in partnership with the Health Science Center and securing its borders and purchasing land from the Department of Defense where there were some military training bases that moved out to Ellington Field. We put in some roads for which we had to get help from the city and the regents; all of our property and buildings belong to UT and the regents. We worked out a collaborative arrangement with the Health Science Center, which already had student dorms down there and a baseball field and their athletic facilities that we now have use of. Then picking which programs would go there and starting to build some buildings. Frankly, we didn’t know how big it was going to become, but we planned “big.” Before the economic downturn, we put up our first 2 or 3 buildings without a master plan, and then we put the brakes on and said, “Wait a minute. This campus may end up with a dozen buildings on it.” We hired a firm to come in and draw a master plan up. We have some beautiful plans about how the campus could look someday, with an integrated feel, but right now it looks somewhat broken up.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
When did this process start, dealing with the land?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
Probably around 2000-2001.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
How did you select the first buildings to put up and who was actually going to be housed there?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
There was 1 building there. It was the Metastasis Center. It was the R.E. “Bob” Smith Building, where Dr. Fidler and his program were located. It was built to be the food delivery service for the old medical center, and that didn’t work out so it was converted to research space. The first new buildings that went up were next to it, in which we focused primarily on immunology and systems biology and some other areas that we wanted to expand. And then it grew from there.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
How did you select the particular areas that were going to be housed far away from the patient care areas?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
It was pragmatic. You’d think you’d want to put your basic sciences down there, but for basic science we’d just built the big Mitchell Building, and what we most needed was growing the lab space for some of the more clinically oriented laboratory researchers. We had to put in shuttle services. It’s non-ideal. People still drive back and forth. You can look on a screen, and you know what time the shuttle that you’re interested in is coming. It’s like the appointments in the clinic. Once it’s routinized and is a reliable system, you work a way out to do it. If you want to go to a conference down there, you’ve got to leave your office here 15 minutes early. If you want to go to a conference on this campus, you’ve got to leave your office 5 minutes early. You’ve “lost” 10 minutes, and time is very precious, so at first we had a lot of people that didn’t want to move down there. They’d be too far away. We had a lot of people that wanted to move down there to get away. Everybody had their own motives, and it was worked out very much on a case-by-case basis. I have to give Dr. Kripke credit. She was the dean at that time, and she had to negotiate the details, although I had a role in it. But I’m going to give her the credit. She was incredible.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I read somewhere that you envisioned the Research Park as presenting an opportunity to unite academic medicine with industry. If you could talk a little bit more about that vision.
John Mendelsohn, MD:
When I was in San Diego starting the UCSD Cancer Center in 1978, I hired a young scientist named Ivor Royston who came there with the purposes of being a faculty member and starting a company, which was called Hybritech. He launched the first biotech company in San Diego, which now has 150 of them. There was a fight among the faculty about whether a faculty member could also be making money by starting a company; there was a huge worry about conflict of interest. It is common practice today. Conflict of interest is a true ethical issue, but it can also get in the way of progress and it can be managed apropriately. I watched the biotech industry grow there. My best friend in San Diego was a man named Bill Otterson, and he was in the computer business and made some money. He came to work essentially voluntarily for the university and set up a program called UCSD Connect. He taught me a lot about business, and I taught him a lot about research. UCSD built up collaborations with scientists and entrepreneurs, and a lot of biotech companies came along. Of course, that was also going on in the San Francisco area, and in Boston. It was going on in the research triangle in North Carolina.
When I came here, I said, “My Goodness. Here we are at the biggest medical center in the world, and there’s very little biotech. We need biotech.” I guess I didn’t think big enough because having now visited MIT I have seen what they accomplished in the past 15 years; they’ve built the Silicon Valley of biotech around MIT. It’s incredible. Most of the big pharmaceutical companies now have their major basic research buildings next to MIT and the interaction is incredible. That’s what I wanted to do here, on a smaller scale, but I didn’t have the resources to do that. I wanted to try to attract some drug companies and some biotech companies by offering them cheap land near the university where they could collaborate with Rice University and us and Baylor and the Health Science Center. I helped start the Houston Technology Center, but for a while they were not that interested in biotech. They were concentrating on other things. I helped start BioHouston, and I’m still the vice-chairman. I tried to figure out ways through community organizations and also through our own resources, to attract biotech to come here.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What’s the advantage of having that attached to the academic institution?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
A little biotech company starting up wants to attract people that work. If they know there are 800 scientists only a mile and a half away who are experts in biomedical research and that they can go to and talk to, they can recruit scientists and post docs to work in their companies that are up to date on all the new technologies. There’s a lot of exchange that goes on between the biotech researchers and the academic researchers in terms of technology and approaches. There’s a lot of proprietary stuff too, so it isn’t a complete exchange of information. The young biotech companies depend on being near major universities and being near others like themselves, because most of them actually fail or are bought out. In either case, the people need new jobs, and if there’s 10 new biotech companies starting up every year in a community, you’re more likely to move there and take a job because you know if that company doesn’t work out there’s going to be another one. We never got that critical mass going here at the level that I’d hoped we would.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
If the institution feeds the biotech companies with potential employees, what’s the other vector, going from biotech to academia?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
If the institution has some inventions, the biotech may license those. It’s very hard to develop a new drug or a new diagnostic test because the grant money you get is mainly for discovery research rather than applied research. You need a few million dollars, and then you need a number of millions of dollars to take a discovery and bring it to the clinic. That’s something that Dr. DePinho understands very well. He’d like to do the same thing in spades. I wish him well, and I hope we succeed. The companies get access to ideas that they can license, they get access to the interchange between companies and with academia, and they get an environment where it’s easier to recruit good scientists to work for them. The majority of people trained in biomedical research don’t go to work for universities. The majority of them, including the ones trained here or even at Harvard, go to work for companies. Companies spend a lot more money on research than academics today. There are good jobs at companies. You don’t have quite the amount of freedom, but you have other securities.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I was talking to George Stancel about the focus of research programs and how it’s still a challenge to get people to think beyond the walls of academia when the reality is most people won’t get jobs in an academic institution.
John Mendelsohn, MD:
I don’t think it’s hard. I think the problem is in the leadership of the graduate school. They’ve got to think that way. They’ve got to bring in people to think that way.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Probably at the level of the classroom too, to get people to always be thinking that maybe, in use, differently and about their skill set, thinking about the skill set they’re developing.
John Mendelsohn, MD:
If you’re in Boston or in San Diego or San Francisco and you’re a grad student, you could spend 3 months at a company as part of your training and not have to move your family. There’s not that kind of opportunity here.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Having a biotech city here, if you will, very near the institution, would actually enhance training.
John Mendelsohn, MD:
It would enhance training. You’d be able to recruit more faculty because they want to be around these people. They may want to jump ship. You’d recruit more students. There are new training programs that we could put in. We need a training program that combines computer science and computational biology and systems biology. That’s where the future is, and we don’t have it yet. If I could just move in and I were the king of the world, I would get Rice and Baylor and the Health Science Center and us together and create the best training program on the planet that brought those fields together along with bioinformatics. We would attract the superstar kids, ages 20 to 25, that we could then recruit into our genomics programs and in all the new research going on which requires a knowledge of how to use computers to get information and how to take science and move it into databases which are only managed with skills that involve computer sciences. Computational biology, systems biology, computer science, and bioinformatics can be interlocked together.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Was there anything else that you wanted to talk about with Research Park and the growth of that particular campus and what it represents to MD Anderson?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
It’s MD Anderson and the Health Science Center, because their dental school is down there, and they have their psychiatry and research program down there. I think what it represents is a way to provide the space in order to expand research in a setting where the Texas Medical Center is getting pretty crowded. Subsequently, in the past few years, still during my presidency, we invested in the property where the Sheikh Zayed building is going up right now. It will include the Sheikh Khalifa Institute and a lot of other things. It’s going to be the growth space for Dr. DePinho to expand basic science. We also purchased the nearby property where the old dental school was.
In the process, we spent money which allowed the Health Science Center to build on the south campus, but we also now have properties adjacent to the hospital, so we have the luxury now of planning the next building programs close by. Well, 1 of those 2 spaces is now being taken by the Sheikh Zayed Facility, but there’s still space where the old dental school is where we can build. So I can’t predict. I think it’s going to be fun to see. I think for the next 3 or 4 years we’re going to be completing the insides of the new building that’s already been started. It’s going to open in 2015. We’re going to be putting a lot of money into the Moon Shots, so I think it’s wise not to build too many additional new buildings. We’ve got our hospital set. We don’t have to worry about that. I don’t know whether there will be another prevention building on this campus or expansion of the clinics, and I don’t know what else will go on the south campus. I’m not in a hurry to guess, and I would think Dr. DePinho is not in a hurry to guess.
Let’s settle on the incredible resources we have now and hire faculty and get programs going and not keep planning which building is going where. We have the buildings we need now. We have the building for administration, too. We put a lovely administration building up on the mid-campus. We did research that showed that we’re paying exorbitant rents for large numbers of administrative offices at multiple local sites and that the new building would pay for itself in 10 years if we could just get rid of all those rents. Why not have a building which is just about in walking distance? I could walk there easily. I bet some people that are in the Mitchell Building would drive there. Why not have an attractive facility instead of renting space? It is open and it has shell space in it which I’m told is rapidly filling up. A lot of the people that are in the Pickens Building are going to have to move there because the faculty continues to grow. There are 2 or 3 floors of the Pickens Building for education and offices which will have to move there to make room for faculty, so we’re blessed with incredible physical plant. My guess is we should now focus now on using to make our Moon Shots work and improve our care.
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Recommended Citation
Mendelsohn, John MD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 15: The Global Programs and Research Park" (2012). Interview Chapters. 1431.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1431
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