On the KU Cancer Center’s website, a clock ticks toward the deadline for when the cancer center has to submit its application to become a National Cancer Institute designated facility.

As of Monday, there were 243 days left. But even after this year’s September deadline, more work is in store for the cancer center.

“We are working very rapidly. We have to continue working at the same pace,” KU Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little said. “We won’t get to the point where we can stop and rest on what we have done for the next couple of months.”

Gray-Little’s comments were made Monday at the Kansas Bioscience Authority’s board of directors meeting in Topeka.

In the past year, the KBA has committed $10 million over the next five years to bring in world-class scientists to the KU Cancer Center. Two more leadership positions at the KU Cancer Center need to be filled before September.

Along with the two leadership positions, the KU Cancer Center is looking to fill a slate of 14 other top-tier scientists. But before more scholars are recruited, the cancer center needs to increase its research space, officials told the KBA board Monday.

“Not only do we need to have the space for people, but to attract the kind of scholars that will help bring NCI designation, we need to have first-rate space,” said Brad Kemp, who through the KBA is working to recruit researchers to the cancer center.

So far, the KBA has contributed $26.5 million to renovate research space at the Wahl/Hixon Research Center on the medical center campus in Kansas City, Kan. A sales tax that Johnson County voters approved a few years ago is going toward establishing another facility, the Phase 1 Clinical Trials Center in Fairway.  

Among the buildings that KU had hoped to have to help attract new scholars is a $64 million, 108,000 square-foot research building at KU’s west campus in Lawrence. That building, which would have pulled together researchers working on drug discovery, is on hold because KU hasn’t been able to find the private and philanthropic funding sources needed to build it, Kemp said.

Consultants working with KU on NCI designation also stressed the need for more research space.

“Facilities remain the issue,” said Debra Lappin, a consultant with B&D Consulting. “We can’t have Wahl/Hixon 50 percent completed and 100 percent dedicated. Recruits require a place to work.”

Part of Monday’s discussion looked at where the cancer center would head after its NCI application was submitted.

Gray-Little urged the cancer center to explore partnerships with the KU School of Engineering and its biomedical engineering program. She also encouraged the cancer center to move forward with work in personalized medicine, which gears treatment methods toward a patient’s individual characteristics.