Mississippi’s only academic medical center hopes to gain a national research designation that could improve outcomes for cancer patients in the state with the highest cancer mortality rate in the country.
The University of Mississippi Medical Center has sought National Cancer Institute designation since 2012, a process it then expected to take five years, the Jackson Free Press reported at the time. Over a decade later, the medical center is again in the early stages of readying itself for an application.
“This is the top priority of the University of Mississippi Medical Center, with staunch support from executive leadership,” said Patrice Guilfoyle, a spokesperson for UMMC.
Guilfoyle declined to say what has prevented the cancer center from reaching its goal over the past 13 years beyond citing changes in leadership and the COVID-19 pandemic. But Mississippi Today spoke with former faculty members who said UMMC previously closed a critical program and lacked the institutional commitment necessary to achieve the status.
The National Cancer Institute, a federal agency run by the National Institutes of Health, recognizes cancer centers that meet rigorous requirements for laboratory and clinical research and translate scientific knowledge into innovative treatments for patients. They also provide training for the next generation of cancer-care professionals and perform outreach to the community. Designated centers receive a support grant from the agency and have access to early clinical trials.
Studies have shown that patients treated at NCI-designated centers have lower mortality rates than people treated at non-designated cancer centers.
Cancer is the second leading cause of death in Mississippi, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Mississippi’s cancer death rate is 25% higher than the national average.
Dr. LouAnn Woodward, vice chancellor for health affairs and dean of the UMMC School of Medicine, wrote in 2022 that gaining the designation was an “ethical imperative.”
She spoke again of its importance at a recent legislative budget hearing for the medical center.
“With Mississippi’s health outcomes in cancer being as terrible as they are, we are committed to working towards this NCI designation,” said Woodward Jan. 14. “It is the thing that will change cancer outcomes in Mississippi.”
There are 72 NCI designated centers nationwide, but none in Mississippi, Louisiana or Arkansas. Cancer patients in Mississippi seeking care at a designated center must travel to Memphis, Birmingham, Dallas or Houston. The designation was first introduced in the 1970s as a part of a national initiative to increase Americans’ access to cutting-edge cancer treatment.
Achieving the designation will be a “long, heavy lift,” that could take as long as a decade, said Dr. Rodney Rocconi, who has served as director of UMMC’s cancer center since 2023. It will require the center to recruit faculty, expand its research capacity and demonstrate strong programming in community outreach and prevention.
The application process is like an “ultra marathon,” said Dr. Barry Sleckman, the director of the University of Alabama at Birmingham O’Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center, one of the nation’s first-ever NCI designated cancer centers and the only one in Alabama.
The state Legislature increased its appropriation for the cancer center to $9 million for the current fiscal year – a nearly $5 million increase. The additional funding is being used for research infrastructure, clinical trials and to recruit researchers.
UMMC has already made significant progress recruiting research faculty, according to Rocconi. In the past year, it has hired 14 faculty members of the 30 he estimates will be necessary to strengthen the center’s research programs and amass the requisite level of federal research grant funding for an application.
Many of the hired faculty members bring federal research grants with them, said Rocconi. A strong NCI designation application requires a cancer center to hold $10 million in cancer-related research funding, though some experts suggest twice that amount is needed.
UMMC falls short of that benchmark. UMMC currently has $3.8 million worth of active federal National Institutes of Health cancer-related research grants, one major source of peer-reviewed cancer research funding, according to publicly available data. Just $500,000 of that funding comes from the National Cancer Institute itself, the most coveted funding source for aspiring NCI-designated cancer centers.
These federal grants could be reduced due to a recent Trump administration policy that would cut the portion of National Institutes of Health grant funding available for overhead costs. The change has been temporarily blocked by a federal judge.
Dr. John Ruckdeschel served as the director of UMMC’s Cancer Center and Research Institute from 2017 to 2020. He previously led Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa to gain NCI designation in 1998 in seven years and helped the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Center in Detroit regain its NCI status.
He hoped to do the same at UMMC, but retired in 2020 after becoming frustrated by what he said was the medical center leadership’s lack of support and funding aimed at helping the cancer center achieve the designation. The COVID-19 pandemic created another hurdle, one Ruckdeschel acknowledges was not the fault of the medical center.
“It is, in fact, difficult to see that there is a genuine institutional commitment to cancer care and cancer research at UMMC,” he wrote in his resignation letter in 2020.
The year he joined UMMC, the Legislature slashed its appropriation for the cancer center from $5 million to $4.25 million. Facing this financial setback, UMMC depended heavily on researchers’ grant funding to support the cancer center but did not invest sufficient resources to retain faculty members and keep an essential program open, Ruckdeschel said.
Grant funding rarely covers the costs of researchers’ salaries and laboratories, Ruckdeschel wrote in a 2020 article about UMMC’s strategy for achieving NCI designation. So if more scientists are hired – even if they bring federal grants with them – the institution must dedicate resources to the center.
“You have to make a pretty major commitment from the University,” Ruckdeschel said. “And they’ve just never been willing to do that.”
NCI-designated centers are required to have community outreach and engagement programming, which UMMC plans to house in the School of Population Health. The cancer center is currently in the process of hiring population health researchers who will direct outreach and engagement efforts, Rocconi said.
However, in 2021 medical center leadership shuttered a program that would have fulfilled that requirement. The program focused on increasing cancer screenings, researching disparities in access to preventive care and exploring variables that impact access to cancer treatment in Mississippi, said Michael Stefanek, the former associate director of the program.
The closure means community outreach efforts must be rebuilt from scratch, said Roy Duhe, one of the program’s former faculty members. “I saw no reason to close that program,” he said.
A community outreach and engagement program is one of the more difficult requirements of a National Cancer Institute application to satisfy because it is unlikely to be funded by grants and requires significant institutional financial support, said Sleckman, the director of Alabama’s NCI-designated institution.
Guilfoyle, a spokesperson for UMMC, declined to say why the program was eliminated, but said work to increase cancer screenings and research disparities in preventive care and access to cancer treatment are ongoing at the institution.
The cancer center has outreach programming for lung cancer screenings, telehealth and chemotherapy symptom tracking.
UMMC also plans to construct a new cancer center building – a five-story, 250,000 square foot facility – that will be housed on UMMC’s main campus and facilitate more collaboration between scientific research and clinical care. The medical center initiated a $125 million capital campaign last month and received its largest-ever donation of $25 million for the building.
“The main focus and the main priority of UMMC is towards cancer,” Rocconi said. “…Our patients and our state need it.”
The post As UMMC continues decade-long quest for cancer designation, former leaders say the medical center previously lacked commitment to cancer care appeared first on Mississippi Today.