Wake Forest Baptist Comprehensive Cancer Center

The main campus facilities of the Wake Forest Baptist Comprehensive Cancer Center (WFBCCC) (Figure 1) are well-defined and include the new Cancer Hospital and WFBCCC administrative space [A], as well as WFBCCC laboratories for basic sciences and Shared Resources [C, D, E, G]. Other facilities include substantial space in the Wake Forest Innovation Quarter (Figure 2) (Biotech Place [20]; 525@Vine [21]; the Dean Building [6]); Piedmont Plaza; the Reynolda (WFU College of Arts and Sciences) Campus; and the Clarkson Campus (Wake Forest Primate Center). These are accessible via a shuttle service that runs throughout the day from the main Medical Center Campus.

The outpatient facilities are located on the first four floors of the WFBCCC building (Figure 3a and b) and provide state-of-the-art care for cancer patients. They include multidisciplinary clinics, the Clinical Protocol and Data Management (CPDM) nurses and data managers, Radiation Oncology, the WFBCCC’s Cancer Patient Support program, diagnostic radiology, and mammography suites.

Inpatient clinical activities in adult medical, gynecologic, and surgical oncology are consolidated in the new WFBCCC hospital with 148 inpatient oncology beds, including a twenty-bed specialty care Bone Marrow Transplant Unit on the seventh floor and a dedicated oncology intensive care unit on the eighth floor. The pediatric oncology program is located in the adjacent Brenner Children’s Hospital, which is contiguous to the new WFBCCC building (Figure 4).

The Wake Forest School of Medicine is comprised of 37 clinical departments, including the sections on Hematology and Oncology, Radiation Oncology, and Surgical Oncology.

WFBCCC members also have clinical appointments in the departments/sections of Gynecologic Oncology, Neurosurgery, Otolaryngology, and Urology. All WFBCCC patients are seen and treated at the Cancer Hospital, Brenner Children’s Hospital, or one of the WFBCCC satellite community clinics (Figure 6).

The Wake Forest NCORP Research Base (U10CA081851; PI: Lesser) is a research base for cancer center affiliates and for NCI-funded NCORP Community Sites (Figure 7). WFBCCC is the only NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center with an NCORP Research Base. NCORP designs and conducts cancer prevention, control, screening, and post-treatment surveillance trials; conducts cancer care delivery research, including comparative effectiveness research; and integrates disparities research questions into clinical trials and cancer care delivery research.

The OCHE is a partnership with the Maya Angelou Center for Health Equity. The two Centers jointly fund a Community Engagement Coordinator to integrate efforts in developing and implementing research and educational programs specifically for underserved communities in the WFBCCC catchment area. The OCHE seeks to enhance understanding of the needs of underserved patients in the WFBCCC catchment area, remove barriers to care for underserved populations, increase diverse participation in clinical trials, and facilitate community engagement to improve outcomes. It is led by the Director for Cancer Health Equity, Karen Winkfield, M.D., Ph.D., Associate Director Jimmy Ruiz, M.D., and Assistant Director, Kathryn Weaver, Ph.D. The OCHE is supported by a Program Manager, Community Engagement Coordinator, Hispanic Clinical Trial Navigator, Community Health Educator, and a Cancer Health Equity Advisory Group.

A total of 121,861 sq ft of laboratory space, with 81,377 sq ft in use (December 2015) and 40,484 ft available for new recruits, is assignable by the WFBCCC Director. Most of the WFBCCC laboratory space is located on the main medical center campus. Two research buildings in the Innovation Quarter (Figure 2) house Cancer Center investigators: the Richard Dean Building and Wake Forest Biotech Place (opened in 2012). This includes an interdisciplinary mix of investigators from Biochemistry, the Virginia Tech–Wake Forest University School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences, Cancer Biology, Microbiology and Immunology, and the Institute for Regenerative Medicine. Shared Resources, such as the Crystallography and Computational Biosciences and part of the Flow Cytometry, are also located at Wake Forest Biotech Place.

A variety of computational platforms are available for faculty and staff to perform their research activities. These range from interactive Linux systems used for primary statistical and genetic analysis, to high-performance computing clusters used for distributed parallel processing, as well as Windows-based servers used for database and statistical processing. Details are provided below.

The cluster, hardware, and software are fully-supported by the Wake Forest University Information Services Department. The WFU DEAC cluster is co-located at a commercial server room facility in the Innovation Quarter, the research park in downtown Winston-Salem, NC. The WFU DEAC cluster is the primary tenant of this server room, measuring approximately 625 sq. ft. with an additional finished 625 sq. ft. expansion capability. At its current configuration, it can support the power needs for cluster growth up to a factor of two in size and the space needs for a factor of five increase in cluster size. Internally, the cluster is capable of significant growth. By design, the cluster scales on all fronts through the simple addition of hardware: computational power scales by adding compute nodes, interactive logins scales by adding head nodes, cluster maintenance requirements scale by adding maintenance nodes, disk bandwidth scales by adding disk nodes to the GPFS file system, disk capacity scales by adding fiber channel based storage to the SAN. One of the most important responsibilities the DEAC/Osiris cluster undertakes is the education of the students at Wake Forest University. Clusters provide enormous computational power to tackle more advanced scientific problems, opening up the possibility for our students to gain a unique perspective on topics in the forefront of research today. Any faculty member can request the use of the cluster for a course. Several courses actively use the DEAC/Osiris cluster to enhance students’ exposure to the advanced computing environment provided by the University.

All servers that are available to the Internet are secured in a DMZ zone, with two hardware firewalls. Local software firewalls are also used on each public server. Public server access is monitored at the hardware firewall location, by an outside monitoring company. The Division also monitors public servers, at the server software location, to help guarantee security. Operating system patches and hotfixes are implemented in a timely-fashion, and can be managed remotely in an emergency.

All servers are physically located in one state-of-the-art 5,500 square foot data center, located in the Innovation Quarter. The facility is designed for security and reliability and provides a central presence for high-end computing (e.g., computing clusters), data storage facilities, centralized backup, and disaster recovery. The entire building’s electrical needs are backed by a one Megawatt on-site generator. The data center provides a fully monitored environment for data processing equipment used by faculty at the undergraduate campus of Wake Forest University (WFU) and a collocation facility for commercial and public service providers for the Innovation Quarter, ensuring multiple high-bandwidth Internet paths.

The networking environment is a fully-converged, high-speed, multi-use network supporting video streaming, VoIP, video teleconferencing, and high-bandwidth display signage, in addition to the typical data traffic along with a fully-integrated wireless environment across all campuses. WFU is one of the founding members of Internet II and utilizes the research and education network daily with our shared Virginia Tech – Wake Forest University School of Biomedical Engineering. WFU also provides the Piedmont region of North Carolina with a Regional Point of Presence (RPoP) called WinstonNet. This robust connection to Internet II and to the North Carolina Research and Education network (NCREN) is capable of ten Gbps and is positioned to move to the Lambda Rail.