A new center for cancer research and clinical trials at the University of California, Irvine, has the potential to give patients who want to use advanced therapies a chance to stay in Orange County for treatments.
It’s the only local institution where people with advanced-stage or treatment-resistant cancers can access early-phase clinical trials involving newer therapies.
Orange County philanthropists Sue and Ralph Stern gave $5 million to the university last month to establish the Sue and Ralph Stern Center for Cancer Clinical Trials and Research.
It’s part of the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, a unit of UC Irvine Health, and is intended to increase the number and complexity of clinical trials available for cancer patients who want to participate.
The center also could bring in extra revenue for UCI.
“The clinical trials could be cash-positive for the university,” Ralph Stern said in an interview last week. “Pharmaceutical companies pay for these trials, generating revenues for the cancer center.”
The Sterns’ gift grew out of a personal experience with UC Irvine Health.
Sue Stern was diagnosed with spinal cancer in 2008 and sought treatment there.
“She’s doing great,” Ralph Stern said of his wife. “We are very grateful patients.”
The Sterns made a pair of gifts to the university to support Drs. Mark Linskey and Daniela Bota for ongoing research covering potential treatment for malignant spinal cord and brain tumors.
“As far as I’m concerned, he has the magic touch,” Ralph Stern said of Linskey. “He did a phenomenal job with her surgeries.”
Richard Van Etten
The Sterns’ gift also played a role in the hiring of the Chao center’s new director, Dr. Richard Van Etten, a hematologist and oncologist who specializes in treatment of leukemia and other blood disorders. He was most recently the director of the Tufts Cancer Center in Boston.
Van Etten said in a news release that the Sterns’ gift “will be a catalyst for changing what it means to be diagnosed with cancer” and that philanthropists and others “are stepping in to fill the void left by declining government support.”
Ralph Stern said that the matter of hiring Van Etten came up in a discussion with Dr. Ralph Clayman, who’s retiring from his position as the dean of UCI School of Medicine but is remaining on faculty.
“Dr. Clayman told me that the result of the search identified this ‘doctor’s doctor’ they wanted to hire, but the university just didn’t have the resources to pay for it,” Stern said. “So I saw an opportunity there for my wife and me to make the gift.”
He said he’s hopeful the new clinical trial and research center will trigger more collaboration among existing cancer centers in Orange County, most of which are affiliated with hospitals.
“It’s very little collaboration amongst the various cancer centers,” he said. “Hospitals have this great expertise that’s not being shared.”
More collaboration among local hospitals would raise the possibility that “we could avoid having the patients leave the county for treatment,” Stern said.
He said he’s had talks with Van Etten and Dr. Richard Afable, chief executive of Irvine-based Covenant Health Network, about collaboration. Covenant is a joint venture of Irvine-based St. Joseph Health and Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian. It has locations in Newport Beach and Irvine.
Steri-Oss
“They both agree that there really are opportunities for collaboration,” said Stern, a native of South Africa who founded and served as chief executive of Steri-Oss Inc., an Anaheim-based dental implant manufacturer.
Bausch & Lomb Inc.—now part of Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc.—acquired Steri-Oss in 1993 in an effort to enter the dental implant market.
Steri-Oss now is part of Swiss dental products maker Nobel Biocare AG, which has an operation in Yorba Linda.
Stern also founded CareCredit, a company that provided financing for dental implants that was eventually bought by GE Capital, a unit of Stamford, Conn.-based General Electric Co.
Stern and UCI have emphasized that commercialization of drug research and the creation of companies isn’t the clinical trial and research center’s primary goal.
“If that happens, that’s great, [but] I wouldn’t say that’s our driving motivation,” Stern said, adding that if new technologies and drugs based on research by UCI faculty are developed, they could also benefit the school through licensing agreements.
UCI has a relatively short history of fostering companies compared to other private and public universities in California. The website for its Office of Technology Alliance lists 38 companies founded to commercialize research done at the university.
Examples of drug companies that came from UCI research include a drug developer, Cortex Pharmaceuticals Inc., that started in the 1980s and is still headquartered in Irvine, and Thesan Pharmaceuticals Inc., a dermatology drug maker in Carlsbad.
The announcement about the new center for clinical trials and its director came shortly before UCI announced it had recruited another high-level hire, naming Eric Spangenberg the next dean of its Paul Merage School of Business. He’s held the same position at Washington State University’s College of Business since 2005 (see related OC Insider item, page 3).
