The University of Arizona has broken ground on its new Center for Advanced Molecular and Immunological Therapies (CAMI).
The biomedical research hub is being built in Downtown Phoenix at Seventh and Fillmore streets.
Over the summer, the Phoenix City Council voted to give UA $20 million for the project, and the state of Arizona is providing $150 million on top of contributions from some smaller donors.
CAMI’s associate director Ryan Sprissler said the hub aims to take basic research in the field of immunology and immunotherapy and create companies that will go out and deliver those breakthroughs to patients.
“We want that data to then come back and inform more basic research studies and create more breakthroughs that then we can deliver to patients and through that kind of iterative process, we can begin to deliver the best possible therapies," Sprissler said.
Those therapies will help treat things like autoimmune diseases and cancer.
“Unlike drugs like chemotherapeutic drugs that will attack all cells as kind of a poisoning of the body, we want to use the immune system to target the specific mutations on individuals’ specific cancers,” Sprissler said.
Sprissler added that CAMI will also create a lot of biotech jobs.
“The companies that we're creating here at CAMI are gonna hopefully stay in the Phoenix area and have this compounding effect that creates more jobs, more opportunity and that feeds back into the basic research to create more companies that brings in more investment,” he said.
The CAMI building is expected to be completed in 2027.
