Dr. Steve Libutti, the William N. Hait director of the Rutgers Cancer Institute and designer of every aspect of the Jack and Sheryl Morris Cancer Center in New Brunswick, recently visited the University of Chicago.
He jokingly said he didn’t receive the warmest reception.
Dr. Adekunle Odunsi, the director of the University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center, which currently is building the 14th free-standing cancer hospital in the country, said The Morris has raised the bar to heights he can’t see.
Odunsi, who is on the external advisory board at the Morris, gave Libutti the ultimate praise.
“The first thing he said to me was, ‘You’ve already taken the shine off of our whole project, because there’s no way ours is going to be anything close to what you guys have done,’” Libutti said. “Ultimately, we’ve thrown down the gauntlet for what these buildings should be.”
The Morris, which began taking patients on Monday, is that good.
If you want to know just how impressive — just how impactful — the Morris is, just listen to the reactions it’s receiving around the state, around the country and around the globe.
“The outreach I’ve been receiving — ever since the ribbon-cutting — has been incredible,” Libutti said. “People see the pictures and read the stories and they are blown away.”
Libutti heard more of that praise on Monday. And each time, he said, he was reminded of the first conversation he had with Jack Morris, the chair of RWJ University Hospital.
At that point, Libutti was only a candidate for the job.
“It was late August, early September back in 2016,” he told BINJE. “It was in the director’s board room on 195 Albany. And at that getting-to-know-each-other moment, Jack asked me what my vision was. If I came and took this job, he asked, what did I want to do? Paramount in that vision was creating this.
“And at that meeting, Jack said, ‘If you come, I commit to you that we will get it done.’”
It took time. You can thank the pandemic for some of the delay. But Libutti feels the wait was worth it. And he’s proud that The Morris is now the nationwide standard.
“You set a bar, and then others are going to try to exceed that bar, and I actually hope they do,” he said. “We’ve made a statement that you can build a facility that supports all the technologies we want to support, that creates an environment for our scientists to make progress in the lab, that allows our clinicians to interact with each other in a multidisciplinary way and in a space that supports that — but still make it look like a hotel instead of a hospital.
“I’m very proud of what we’ve achieved. And I hope others attempt to exceed it, because I think that would be great for all cancer patients.”
Dr. Andrew Evans, the chief physician officer at The Morris, recently discovered during a trip to a conference in Switzerland that the center’s reputation already has reached Europe.
“I had people from France, Germany and the UK, who had seen what we’re doing, talking to about it,” he said.
Libutti said he knew all along that the Morris could be this impactful.
The concept of bringing science and clinical care together in one place was similar to the experience he had when he was at the National Cancer Institute.
“Being able to build it in such a way that it’s patient-centered but still providing the science and the ability for different specialists to interact, was the thought literally from the day I interviewed,” he said.
That’s why Libutti was most touched when he heard from Steve Rosenberg, his mentor at the National Cancer Institute.
“It meant so much to me,” he said. “He had seen the pictures and the articles that had been written about the building, and he sent me an email that basically said, ‘I always knew you would do great things. And see, I was right.’
“To receive that from somebody who means a lot to me — a recognition of what we’ve labored to do here — was very validating and very meaningful.”
