The Cleveland Clinic broke ground today for a $75 million building to house the hospital’s Pathology and Laboratory Medicine Institute and Cleveland Clinic Laboratories.
The project that is expected to improve the Clinic’s medical testing capabilities and create hundreds of jobs has changed significantly since it was first proposed in February 2009.
Then, the project was an expansion of its reference laboratory, which does tests for other hospitals and medical facilities that can’t or don’t want to do the tests themselves. The proposed 100,000-square-foot building on the Clinic’s main campus, estimated to cost $25 million, promised to add up to 500 jobs within five years.
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By October, the leader of the expanding reference laboratory, Dino Kasdagly, who had left a similar position at Mayo Clinic only a year before, was gone from the Clinic. The health system also had revised its plans for the project, building a larger lab on its main campus but scaling back potential future employment by 20 percent to 30 percent.
At that time, Dr. Kandice Kottke-Marchant, chair of the Clinic’s Pathology and Laboratory Medicine Institute, also became chair and director of Cleveland Clinic Laboratories, as the reference lab was renamed.
Today, the groundbreaking will be for a combined institute and reference lab. The building, which is being constructed near East 105th Street and Carnegie Avenue, will be three stories high and 135,000 square feet in size.
The Pathology and Laboratory Medicine Institute now employs 1,300 and conducts more than 12 million tests each year.
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“The new building will feature state-of-the-art laboratories for testing of tissues and other samples to help the medical community detect, diagnose and treat diseases,” Kottke-Marchant said in a Clinic release. The institute “will attract new business opportunities through our reference laboratory, Cleveland Clinic Laboratories and fuel development of better, faster tests,” she said.
The Clinic was not specific Thursday about how many jobs the project will create, saying only that it be in the hundreds.
“This project continues Cleveland Clinic’s dedication to economic and workforce development in Northeast Ohio,” Dr. Matt McManus, head of Cleveland Clinic Laboratories, said in the release. “We will be creating jobs and offering world-class services to institutions in Northeast Ohio and throughout the country through this unique facility.”
McManus joined the Clinic in 2007 and has experience in consumer healthcare from previous employer Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati, Ohio, according to a speakers’ biography for Lab Leaders’ Summit 2010. He also has worked for management consultancy McKinsey & Co. and drugmaker Novartis.
