Cancer and surgery center coming soon 

The UT Health RGV Cancer and Surgery Center is set to open Aug. 4 after experiencing multiple construction delays Oncology Administrative Director Kimberly Elizondo said had been completely out of their control. 

“There have been several construction delays that were out of our control and even out of the construction company’s control for some items that needed to be shipped in for certain components for the HVAC unit,” Elizondo said. “Unfortunately, because those delays were out of everybody’s control, that did put a set back to June.”

She said the second delay was with the surgery center clean room. 

“The [second setback] was the surgery center in one area needing to be updated to standards and codes,” Elizondo said. “So, that pushed it to our Aug. 4 opening date. … The building’s at 93.8% complete already and that was on [April 4].”

Vaughn Construction serves as the manager at risk for the project. According to Senior Director of Capital Projects Agustin Rodriguez, Vaughn Construction was one of the many public bids that were submitted by several different contractors.

“There’s criteria that we use to give points to all the contractors and it goes from the price,” Rodriguez said. … “It’s also about qualifications based on history with the university or working with the UT System. It is a number of things that we looked at to ensure that this project was going to run smoothly and they had the qualified people in place to do that.”

He said with all the construction that has been playing out in South Texas, there have been resources that have been taken away from different projects, especially larger projects.

“There’s only so many electricians in the Valley … so they’re all being stretched out to different locations,” Rodriguez said. “There were some changes that the School of Medicine requested in the building that caused some delays in the project, so it was a little bit of everything.”

Diane Nguyen, medical director for the UT Health RGV Cancer and Surgery Center and division chief of Medical Oncology at UTRGV School of Medicine, said the center will be similar to a comprehensive cancer center, such as the UT Health San Antonio Mays Cancer Center. 

“We basically offer comprehensive cancer care. It will include medical oncology with infusion,” Nguyen said. “We have chemotherapy, immunotherapy, techno-therapy and, hopefully, in the future, we can do more advanced CAR T-cell [therapy], you know all the fancy immunotherapy treatments.” 

According to the American Cancer Society, CAR T-cell therapy is a procedure that takes immune cells called “T cells” and modifies them in the lab to help identify and destroy cancer cells. This is modifying the genes of the cells in order to combat the cancer. 

Nguyen said the center will also include radiation oncology, surgical oncology, orthopedic oncology and a rehab center.

“Not only [do] we do infusion chemotherapy immunotherapy, but we have a lot of oral oncolytic therapy that we must have specialty pharmacy in house,” she said. “I think it will make a huge change in the community and also us, UTRGV, as a whole. We offer the most comprehensive and best cancer care to the whole Valley, which so far we don’t have that service in the Valley.”

Nguyen said a big part of the cancer center is translational science with clinical research and clinical trials.

“We do have internal medicine resident, family medicine resident and surgical resident,” she said. “I think that would be also great for our UTRGV health and School of Medicine overall.”