Elaine Thillen would like to see a warmer, more inviting entrance to a new outpatient cancer treatment center at Medical College of Georgia Hospital and Clinics.

"I think it provides an opportunity for people who have enough fears going in to perhaps be a little more knowledgeable or a little more comfortable going into it," she said after being treated for breast cancer there in 2006. But aside from the grand opening, she hopes she never has to go there again.

Mrs. Thillen was part of a patient advisory group that helped shape the new $31 million center, which will not only be more patient-friendly but also will try to bring patients into the forefront of cancer research, director Kapil Bhalla said. Some of that is due to his own research.

The health system will break ground next month on the two-story center on the corner of Laney-Walker and R.A. Dent boulevards. Dr. Bhalla is hoping to have the second floor connected by a walkway to the existing Cancer Research Center but is still trying to raise the money to do it. He sees it as a symbolic connection.

Georgia has designated MCG as a tumor bank for the state, which gives its researchers access to patient data before and after treatment in some cases. And Dr. Bhalla and other researchers are leading the way in deciphering how the cancers manipulate gene expression to grow and survive potential attack. It's called cancer epigenetics, and Dr. Bhalla's lab is focused on two potential drug treatments that have arisen from it. One is called an histone deacetylase inhibitor, and the other is a heat shock protein 90 inhibitor.

Dr. Bhalla recently got a five-year, $1.5 million grant from the National Cancer Institute to study how the protein inhibitor attacks the cancer's survival mechanisms in mantle cell lymphoma patients. He got a $1.3 million, five-year NCI grant last year to study the other inhibitor in acute leukemia patients. Both drugs are now available to patients in the Clinical Research Unit, which will go into the new center's second floor.

That is in addition to other National Institutes of Health grants to study chronic leukemia and breast cancer and a Department of Defense grant to study leukemia. Having the grants and the study drugs from pharmaceutical companies has a combined impact, Dr. Bhalla said.

"The two grants put us really in the limelight and give us the funding to pursue this research over the next five years, showcase us as one of the national leaders, and then that makes us an attractive place for pharmaceutical companies to bring trials here," he said.

Having the tumor bank also means being better able to study exactly what the drugs are doing to the cancers, Dr. Bhalla said.

Those getting standard treatments will be greeted with a multidisciplinary team approach on the first floor, Dr. Bhalla said. On the first visit, patients will meet with every surgeon and oncologist overseeing their care, and a patient navigator will make sure they get to where they need to go, he said.

"So basically from the front end to the actual implementation of the treatment, there's somebody guiding them through the comprehensive management plan," Dr. Bhalla said.

As genetic information on cancer patients gets more sophisticated, it is the kind of approach patients will need -- and will increasingly demand, Dr. Bhalla said.