By Neil Offen

noffen@heraldsun.com; 419-6646

DURHAM — Half a dozen Caterpillar earth movers stood at rest Friday morning while inside an adjacent gleaming white tent, Duke University leaders and the governor tried to peer beyond what’s now just a construction hole.

“We didn’t dig this hole to just have a hole or just have a building in the hole,” university President Richard Brodhead told several hundred dignitaries, medical staff, donors and patients gathered inside the tent for the groundbreaking of the planned new Duke Medicine Cancer Center. “We’re digging it because we see the future of cancer care and cancer research here.”

The new facility, which is scheduled to open in 2012, will put all cancer-related activities, including patient care and research, under one roof, rather than scattered across the medical center campus as they are now. The center, which Duke University Health System CEO Victor Dzau termed a “one-stop shop,” is part of a $700 million project that includes a new Duke Medicine Pavilion for surgery and critical care.

The cancer facility will be a seven-story building between the School of Nursing and Duke Hospital South that will have 267,000 square feet of additional space featuring terraces, a cafe and an outdoor rooftop garden where patients can have their chemotherapy sessions.

“It will be completely centered on the patient experience,” said Kevin Sowers, Duke Hospital CEO, noting that “as you enter the building, one of the first things you will see is a patient resources center.”

With a predicted 20 percent rise in cancer cases in the Triangle over the next five years, officials emphasized the need for such a facility, even though a similar resource — the N.C. Cancer Hospital — just opened earlier this fall on the nearby UNC medical campus in Chapel Hill.

There will be more than enough cancer cases to go around, officials said.

“I have gotten to the age when I don’t ask if I’ll be diagnosed, but when, because cancer is so prevalent among us,” said guest speaker Gov Beverly Perdue.

Perdue said she had asked Dzau what she would see at the construction site.

“And he explained how magnificent it’s going to be,” Perdue said. “This will be historic, and critically important to the world, not just North Carolina.”

The new facility, the governor added, “is about hope, it’s about compassion, it’s about a cure.”

Dzau, in his remarks, used the word “cure” repeatedly.

“People are a little nervous about using that word,” he acknowledged. “But we’re not. Curing cancer is an ambitious concept. But curing cancer is what we aspire to at Duke Medicine.”