Two hospitals that specialize in juvenile and adult cancers will seek grants together as well as share resources to aid each other's patients.
By LISA GREENE
Published October 13, 2004
ST. PETERSBURG - Two of Tampa Bay's leading research hospitals announced a partnership Tuesday aimed at winning millions of dollars for cancer research.
All Children's Hospital in St. Petersburg has signed an affiliation agreement with H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute in Tampa.
The hospitals will apply together to win research grants. Moffitt will get more information about children's cancer genes from All Children's for its genetics research, and All Children's patients are more likely to receive treatment from Moffitt doctors.
"This is indeed a day of celebration for the folks at Moffitt," said Dr. William Dalton, Moffitt's director and CEO. "The ultimate beneficiaries are the patients and citizens of Florida."
Gary Carnes, All Children's president and CEO, said working out a formal agreement that involves two hospitals as well as coordination with a university and various doctors isn't easy.
"A lot of people thought this was impossible," Carnes said. But "the more we looked at things, the more we thought we were a lot alike."
Both hospitals are affiliated with the University of South Florida. Dr. Stephen Klasko, USF's new vice president of health sciences and medical school dean, praised the agreement Tuesday.
"It's wonderful for us to have the opportunity to work with those hospitals, and it's wonderful when they work together," he said.
All three men said the arrangement won't take grant money from USF.
All Children's and Moffitt already have research projects together and occasionally share patients. One of the children who came to Tuesday's announcement, for example, has been treated by a doctor who works at Moffitt and at All Children's. Billy Gowacki, 12, is now in remission from a bone cancer called Ewing's sarcoma. He called the partnership "a very good idea."
But making the agreement formal will encourage more cooperation and make it easier to win large grants, hospital leaders said.
"Some grants we wouldn't be able to get if we didn't join forces," said Dr. Karen Fields, medical director of Moffitt's Total Cancer Care program.
The two have different research strengths and specialties, Fields said. Moffitt doesn't treat children at its facility. And because adult and child cancers are significantly different, faculty members have different specialties.
In adults, the most common cancers are those of the lung, breast, prostate and colon.
But at All Children's, where children with cancer were admitted 1,300 times last year and made more than 11,000 outpatient visits, the focus is very different. That's because the most common children's cancers are blood cancers. Adults and children even tend to develop different types of brain tumors.
At Moffitt, researchers recently started the Bill and Beverly Young National Functional Genomics Center, named after Rep. C.W. Bill Young, R-Largo, and his wife. Its job: to study the molecular profile of individual tumors, with the goal of tailoring treatments for individual patients.
Partnering with All Children's will give the center more data on children's tumors, Dalton said.
