Harlyne J. Norris
Research Tower
The USC/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center is in the midst of a major expansion, constructing new research facilities and expanding its faculty.
Harlyne J. Norris Cancer Research Tower
Completed in April 2007, the Harlyne J. Norris Research Tower is a 10-story, 172,000-square-foot building adjacent to the existing USC/Norris facilities. This new structure joins the original USC/Norris building, Ezralow Family Research Tower, and the Norman Topping Research Tower to complete a trio of structures that combine world-class research and leading-edge clinical trials with high-caliber, compassionate patient care.
The new tower provides five floors devoted to basic research, two floors for preventive medicine research, an atrium with attached lobby, a conference center and a landscaped courtyard. The building is dedicated to the vision of the late Kenneth Norris Jr. - husband of the building's namesake - "to make cancer a disease of the past."
New Hospital at CHLA
Construction is underway on a seven-floor, 317-bed New Hospital Building at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, which will be wrapped around the H. Russell and Jeanne R. Smith Research Tower.
Some say that when the 460,000 square-foot New Hospital at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles opens in 2009, it will be the finest medical and surgical environment for seriously ill and injured children anywhere in the United States.
The New Hospital at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles will include an Emergency Department; imaging facilities; a Cancer Day Hospital, with a 48-bed acute care Hematology/Oncology unit and a 14-bed Bone Marrow Transplant (BMT) unit; a 24-bed Cardiothoracic Intensive Care Unit (CTICU) and a 21-bed acute inpatient medical heart unit; a 24-bed Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU); and a 58-bed Center for Newborn and Infant Critical Care (CNICC). There will be 128 additional medical and surgical acute care beds.
New Faculty Members
In addition to expanding its facilities, USC/Norris also is adding to its faculty. USC/Norris recently welcomed these new members:
Amir Goldkorn, M.D., assistant professor of medicine at the Keck School of Medicine, is an oncologist who specializes in genitourinary (GU) malignancies. Clinically, Dr. Goldkorn treats patients with advanced cancers of the prostate, bladder, kidney, and testis, and he participates as an investigator in several of the ongoing GU clinical trials at Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center. Dr. Goldkorn’s research interests lie in the area of experimental therapeutics, and his laboratory focuses on targeting telomerase, an enzyme that is critical for cancer cell proliferation and tumor growth. Dr. Goldkorn’s lab also studies novel therapeutic approaches to cancer stem cells, a unique sub-population of tumor cells with the capacity to self-renew and to differentiate into additional tumors while remaining unscathed by available treatments. Successful targeting of cancer stem cells, by telomerase interference or by other strategies, may be the key to eliminating the source of deadly cancer recurrences and metastases.
Young Kwon Hong, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Surgery and Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, is studying the molecular mechanism underlying new blood and lymphatic vessel formation during embryogenesis and tumor growth. He is also interested in Kaposi's sarcoma, an AIDS-related malignancy.
Agnieszka Kobielak, Ph.D., assistant professor of otolaryngology at Keck School of Medicine studies alterations that enable epithelial tumor cells to acquire invasive and metastatic characteristic, with the focus on basic cellular machinery that links cell adhesion, signal transduction and cytoskeletal regulation to ultimately recognize targets for invasion and metastasis prevention.
Judd Rice, Ph.D., assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the Keck School of Medicine, researches epigenetic gene regulation - the turning on and off of genes through chemical modifications to structures in the nucleus. Specifically, Dr. Rice studies the "tails" of the histone proteins, which tend to stick out of the bundled-up nucleosome and into the nucleus itself, and serve as lightning rods for an epigenetic process known as methylation - the addition of a methyl group to a stretch of protein or DNA.
Woojin An, Ph.D., assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the Keck School of Medicine, studies chromatin and the way DNA is wound tightly around histone proteins and then, ultimately, unwound to be translated into enzymes and other proteins for the cells to use. Dr. An is looking specifically at the way the tumor-supressor protein p53 activates gene transcription that promotes cell-growth arrest for damaged DNA repair.
Allen Yang, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of medicine at the Keck School of Medicine and an oncologist, splits his time between research and patient care. On the clinical side, he is developing a program to offer trials of investigational therapies, based in epigenetics, to patients with hematologic malignancies that have resisted traditional medications.
Si-Yi Chen, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Molecular Microbiology & Immunology at the Keck School of Medicine. His research interests include studies on regulation of innate and adaptive immunity, immune and gene therapy against cancer, and immune and gene therapy against HIV infection.