$19.5 million gift from Doug Meijer and the Meijer Foundation is creating a cutting-edge clinic in a new medical innovation building now under construction at the MSU Grand Rapids Innovation Park.
The building will be named for Doug Meijer and will house a theranostics clinic that includes a cyclotron-equipped radiopharmacy and PET MR, which can be used in cancer diagnosis and therapy. Meijer is a cancer survivor and advocate for treatment for all cancer patients.
“The Meijer family has always been passionate about health care, and I am thankful to have the ability to carry that passion forward,” he says. “This new building will help save lives and improve the quality of life for many people through remarkable cancer-fighting technology. Patients will no longer have to travel overseas to receive needed treatment. I am living proof this technology works.”
MSU President Samuel L. Stanley Jr., M.D., adds: “The initiative supported by this generous gift could have a tremendous impact on health care by helping detect disease sooner, offering more effective and less invasive treatments, eliminating unnecessary procedures, reducing side effects and increasing time in remission. This innovative partnership between MSU, the western Michigan community and business participants could ultimately improve patients’ quality of life and help cut health care costs. It is this type of global impact that MSU strives to accomplish, and with generous gifts like this we can do just that.”
Groundbreaking for the Doug Meijer Medical Innovation Building took place in November with completion expected in late 2021.
“Bringing hope, health and healing for all people is our imperative,” says Norman J. Beauchamp Jr., M.D., MSU executive vice president for health sciences. “We are creating a facility defined by the ability to create and implement tools and approaches that make affordable, compassionate and equitable care a reality. Academia, industry, health systems, community…together everything is possible.”
Last summer, Health Innovation Partners—a real estate development joint venture between Rockford Construction, Walsh Construction/Walsh Investors and Murphy Development Group—and MSU signed a long-term ground lease for the development of a medical innovation building and parking structure at the MSU Grand Rapids Innovation Park. The first building on site, the MSU Grand Rapids Research Center, opened in September 2017.
LEARN MORE about support for the College of Human Medicine by contacting Senior Director of Development Stephanie Stotenbur at hehl@msu.edu or by calling (616) 234-2827.