Kapil Bhalla leaned on the short shovel Wednesday as a white hard hat dangled from his fingers. He looked up at Medical College of Georgia colleagues Anand Jillella and Thomas Samuel standing nearby.

"If we don't interact, patients don't benefit," said Dr. Bhalla, the director of the MCG Cancer Center.

MCG and MCG Health Inc. officials broke ground Wednesday on a $31 million Cancer Center for outpatient treatment. It will also have an expanded Clinical Research Unit that will house early-phase clinical trials in new treatments for cancer. Some of them are already at MCG.

Dr. Samuel, for instance, has just started a clinical trial on a lung cancer vaccine.

"Basically what we're going to be doing is sensitizing the patient's lung cancer to their own immune system so their own immune system can react to it," said Dr. Samuel, a medical oncologist and director of the clinical breast cancer program at MCG.

It is the first cancer vaccine clinical trial at MCG, he said.

Likewise, Dr. Jillella is looking at whether leukemia uses a chemical called IDO to create a tolerance to itself in the immune system and prevent attack.

"Once we show that it is expressed in leukemia, we will probably use the (IDO) inhibitor," said Dr. Jillella, the section chief for hematology/oncology at MCG.

Both trials build on work done at MCG by Dr. David Munn and colleagues in the Cancer Research Center. That building will be linked to the new Cancer Center by a walkway, a bridge that Dr. Bhalla fought for.

"The bridge is important not just from a functional standpoint," Dr. Samuel said. "It's a symbolic sort of link between the research and the clinical care."

The link also is there in Dr. Bhalla, whose research is churning out cutting-edge treatments. His work on a histone deacetylase inhibitor, used to attack cancer at a molecular level, has helped a patient with myelofibrosis, a blood disease that causes scarring of the bone marrow and for which there is no good treatment.

He is talking to the manufacturer, Novartis, about a clinical trial in Augusta, and he said colleagues at the Mayo Clinic and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston want in.

"It's going to be a national trial, and it's our discovery," he said.

The new center is another step on the way to trying to become a National Cancer Institute-designated Cancer Center. There is not one in Georgia or South Carolina. Emory University's Winship Cancer Institute in Atlanta and the Hollings Cancer Center at the Medical University of South Carolina have applied and expect to hear next year whether they will get it.

MCG is probably seven to 10 years away, Dr. Bhalla said. But the center is a good start on building up the research, programs and patients it will need, he said.

"Once we invest a little bit," he said, "we can get an incremental and logarithmic jump in our programs and resources. A little investment now is all that's needed. I guarantee you, in 10 years this place will be unrecognizable."