Lofty Goals Set : New Florida Medical Center Specializes in Fight Against Cancer

The new hospital here has no emergency room, no delivery room. It doesn’t treat heart disease or chicken pox. It has no operating room for broken bones or appendicitis.

The has a single purpose--to understand and overcome the nation’s No. 2 killer disease.

It is an ambitious goal for the research hospital built with $54 million in cigarette tax money and help from a legislative leader who survived cancer himself but lost three friends to the disease.

Cure rates for the major types of cancer have barely improved in three decades, according to its medical director, Dr. Richard C. Karl.

‘Where Answers Are Found’

With pioneering technology and strides being made in cellular and immune studies, Karl’s aim is to make the Moffitt Cancer Center “one of the places where . . . answers are found.”

He already talks about putting the hospital, which opened Oct. 27 on the University of South Florida campus, on the front lines in the cancer war alongside the prestigious Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and the M. D. Anderson Hospital in Houston.

“My hope is that 40 years from now this building will be obsolete and used for something else,” Karl said.

By that time, he hopes that the immune system is so well understood that cancer will be as preventable as polio.

The nonprofit, 162-bed center is devoted solely to research on cancer, the second leading cause of death in the nation behind heart disease.

It is named for a former Florida House Speaker from Tampa who persuaded former Gov. Bob Graham of its merits and then fended off critics who said its beds were not needed.

Friends’ Deaths Sparked Drive

H. Lee Moffitt himself survived a bout with cancer 15 years ago when doctors removed a malignant tumor from his right knee.

“But that wasn’t really the impetus for the center,” he said. “I had three friends close to me die of cancer in their 30s.

“That was my motivation,” he said, and it was what prompted him to push the unusual hospital financing arrangement through the Legislature. Using his clout as House speaker, he won support to divert revenues from an existing 21-cents per pack cigarette tax to the cancer center project.

The hospital opened debt-free.

Lung Cancer Deadliest

The American Cancer Society estimates that 930,000 new cases of cancer will be diagnosed in this country in 1986 and that 472,000 people will die from the disease. Lung cancer is the worst enemy, claiming 87% of the people it strikes.

Breast cancer is expected to cause 40,000 deaths this year; colon-rectal, 60,000 deaths; prostate, 26,000 deaths; pancreatic, 24,000 deaths.

“The cure rates are about the same as 1955 with the big cancers. There’s been no big improvement,” said Karl, who expects significant progress in the next two decades.

The center has a medical staff of 150 from the university’s college of medicine, offering specialties in diagnosis, oncology, surgery, radiation therapy and pathology.

Latest in Equipment

A progressive academic environment in a warm, fast-growing area like Tampa will lure top people in the field, he predicted.

The center’s doctors search for answers in laboratories where the tiniest of cells can be isolated under high-powered microscopes, and in treatment rooms with state-of-the-art machines capable of honing in on malignancies.

“We have an enormous problem,” said Dr. Gary Lyman, chief of medicine. “The state is highly motivated because of the high mortality rate in Florida.”

Florida is behind only Rhode Island and Washington, D.C., in the number of cancer deaths per 100,000 population, according to the American Cancer Society. The high elderly population helps explain the high rate.

The disease affects nearly 50,000 residents a year, claiming half, according to a state survey. Projections for the year 2000 show 75,000 new cases a year.

Florida’s cancer death rate increased almost 70% from 1961 to 1981, an average annual jump of 4%. The nation’s rate, meanwhile, rose 2% annually, said Dr. Denis Cavanagh, an American Cancer Society professor of clinical oncology.

The National Cancer Institute funds only 20 comprehensive research and clinic hospitals devoted solely to cancer.

Mental Aspect Also Treated

Doctors say their longest, loneliest walk is down a corridor to confirm a patient’s worst fears. While medicine and research fight for breakthroughs in a terrifying disease, the Moffitt Cancer Center’s design and special staffing aim to give patients hope.

There is one social worker for every 12 patients, a psychiatrist and a chaplain, a playroom for young children and a teen room filled with books, a video system, a stereo and a computer.

“At other hospitals, the playrooms are babyish,” said Sanci Hiscock, a 14-year-old whose leukemia, now in remission, is being treated at the Moffitt center. “Here, we have our own room.”

Smiling, she added: “When I get down I put on a tape and listen to ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.’ It’s a funny song that makes me laugh. . . . I thank the Lord that I’m still here.”

The six-story Moffitt center is a sand-colored, twin-tower building that commands the sprawling, flat campus from a palm-decked grassy knoll. With warm wood parquet floors and plants adorning a spacious, airy lobby of earth tones, glass and soft curved ceilings, it has already captured four design awards.

“I don’t know another single word that strikes fear like the word cancer,” said Stuart L. Bentler, who designed the center in partnership with Heery Architects & Engineers of Atlanta.

“We tried to get away from the appearance of an institution.”

Rita Silvernail, 64, who traveled 68 miles from Inverness, Fla., for ovarian surgery, said: “It’s not like a hospital. You don’t feel that hospital depression.”

‘More Like a Resort’

Bright red tones in a fall foliage scene accented pale green walls in her room, which like others was arranged fan-like around a semi-circular nursing station and had windows looking onto the active hub area for more patient-nurse contact.

After Silvernail tacked pictures of her daughter and grandchildren on a bulletin board in her room, she added, “It’s more like a resort here.”

The center has a $75,000 machine shop where a lathe and table saw are used to make plastic shields that are surgically implanted to protect healthy tissue during treatment to kill cancer cells.

The hospital uses a linear accelerator that makes administering radiation more controllable. And it’s involved in pioneering antibody research designed to send killing doses of radiation to a tumor but nowhere else in the body.

“I can see the potential for a major medical facility,” said Moffitt. “But outside Florida we’re going to have to pay our dues. Sloan-Kettering and M. D. Anderson have years of reputation ahead of us.”

‘My hope is that 40 years from now this building will be obsolete and used for something else.’--Dr. Richard C. Karl,

H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute’s medical director