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Sanford builds to consolidate breast cancer fight

Jon Walker

Sanford Health will break ground this fall on a new breast cancer facility on its main Sioux Falls campus.

Construction will start by October on the Edith Sanford Breast Center on 18th Street, west of Grange Avenue. The building will cost $25 million to $30 million and will open by January 2017, Paul Hanson, president of the Sanford USD Medical Center, said Thursday.

The center will consolidate services Sanford now offers in various locations.

"It's so women can receive all their care in one stop," he said.

The building will be on the north side of 18th Street, opposite the main hospital on the south side. It will sit between Sanford's Van Demark Building, which houses orthopedics and sports medicine, and Sanford's existing cancer center, also along the north side of 18th. A corridor will connect the three buildings.

Early drawings show the building to be three stories tall from street level with a tower to include the likeness of Edith Sanford. Her son, philanthropist T. Denny Sanford, said his mother died of the disease when he was 4. He gave the health system $100 million in her name in 2011 to fight the disease. Officials were uncertain Thursday whether her likeness would be an etching, engraving or some other art form.

The breast cancer building will have what officials call a collegiate gothic look similar to Sanford's heart hospital at 18th Street and Grange Avenue. The new building, at 48,000 square feet, will be a little less than one-fourth the size of the heart hospital and becomes the third-largest improvement of the campus in the Sanford era. The $60 million children's hospital opened in 2009 at 22nd Street and West Avenue. The heart hospital, costing $75 million, opened in 2012.

Sanford has been treating and researching breast cancer for years. Spending multiple millions of dollars to consolidate the work is a step many health systems, including Avera across town, have taken to make the setting more comfortable for patients and the work more efficient for medical specialists. The disease strikes one in eight women, or 12 percent, during their lifetime. In South Dakota, about 600 women learn each year that they have breast cancer and 110 die from the disease.

Clinical work, radiation, chemotherapy, plastic surgery and genetic counseling will be in the new building as will the Sanford biobank, a collection point for DNA samples to aid research. Much of the scientific study will remain in Sanford's main research building at Lewis Avenue and 60th Street North. Breast cancer surgery will remain in current surgical suites, but consolidating most services in one location is intended to improve the overall approach to treatment.

"Day to day, it allows all the disciplines to be under one roof," said Dr. Jesse Dirksen, breast surgeon for Sanford. "Having a nice beautiful building ... is going to help with some of that stress level also."

Dirksen said the project does not alter Sanford's attention to other forms of disease.

"We have all the cancers covered," he said. "But Mr. Sanford is very passionate about breast cancer, losing his mother at a very young age. He's made breast cancer a priority."

Sanford projects

Sanford projects on the health system's central Sioux Falls campus:

• Heart hospital, 205,000 square feet, opened March 2012, cost $75 million.

• Children's hospital, 180,000 square feet, opened March 2009, cost $60 million.

• Edith Sanford Breast Center, 48,000 square feet, January 2017, $25 million to $30 million.