UMMC’s $2.4 Million Grant Leaves a Steeper NCI Climb

The University of Mississippi Medical Center received a $2.4 million federal grant on August 14 to renovate cancer labs that have sat largely untouched for nearly 30 years. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith and Rep. Michael Guest secured the money through the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the fiscal 2026 spending bill.

The award pays for equipment and a redo of about 14,000 square feet in the UMMC Research Wing. It does not, by itself, deliver the National Cancer Institute designation the medical center has chased since 2012.

Lawmakers Parked $2.4 Million in an Old Research Wing

Hyde-Smith and Guest, both Mississippi Republicans on their chambers’ appropriations committees, said they won the NIST funds in the fiscal 2026 bill. NIST is an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, so this is construction and equipment money, not an NIH research grant.

Their joint statement said the project will renovate and equip 14,000 square feet in the Research Wing, space that has not had a major renovation in nearly 30 years. Hyde-Smith said the upgrade is “just one more step toward creating a facility that will draw more cancer researchers to our state.”

Guest pointed to UMMC’s record, including the heart transplant it hosted in 1964, and said the medical center is “taking a critical step in attaining its federal designation as a National Cancer Institute.” The designation is the goal. The NIST check is a lab rehab.

https://x.com/SenHydeSmith/status/2088277703157751988

Hyde-Smith, who sits on the Senate Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Subcommittee, has also pressed the National Institutes of Health on the NCI bid, including at a May hearing on the NIH budget. The announcement post on her Senate account framed the $2.4 million as another step toward designation for Mississippi. The replies under that post offered congratulations. They did not ask how far $2.4 million moves a center that still has to clear NCI’s science-funding bar.

A $250 Million Building Now Has State Cash

The Research Wing job is the small renovation beside a much larger capital plan. UMMC is raising private gifts and drawing state money for a five-story Cancer Center and Research Institute on the Jackson campus, a new 250,000 square-foot cancer center that the campaign says will put care, research and education under one roof for the first time in the state.

Mississippi Today reported the building’s estimated cost at $250 million. On March 30, UMMC said its “It’s About Time” drive had reached $100 million, 80 percent of a $125 million private-gift goal, and called it the largest campaign in the medical center’s history. Gov. Tate Reeves later signed a $100 million state appropriation for construction.

John and Sandy Black of Madison committed $25 million in 2025, the largest gift in UMMC history, according to the University of Mississippi Foundation. Later campaign gifts reported by UMMC include $10 million from the Bower Foundation, $10 million from Jean Morris Adams, $5 million from C Spire, $5 million from Jim Kennedy and $2 million from Trustmark. On August 18 the UMMC Cancer Center and Research Institute said Jackson attorney Ron Yarbrough had given $1 million in memory of his wife, Jean.

Set beside that stack, the NIST award is a rounding error on the building and a full renovation budget for one aging wing. SuperTalk Mississippi noted the federal funds arriving as the hospital pushes the 250,000-plus square foot project. The old labs still have to work until the new floors open.

The $10 Million Research Floor UMMC Has Not Cleared

NCI does not hand out the badge for new benches. A new applicant for a Cancer Center Support Grant must show a $10 million funding base if it is applying as a clinical cancer center, or $6 million if it is applying as a basic center, according to the current NCI notice (PAR-25-444).

Mississippi Today, citing public NIH records in February 2025, found UMMC held $3.8 million in active federal NIH cancer-related grants. Only $500,000 of that came from NCI itself, the paper reported, and some experts told the reporters a strong application needs twice the $10 million floor. Dr. Rodney Rocconi has directed the cancer center since 2023. By early 2025 he said the center had hired 14 of the 30 faculty members he estimated it would need, and that many of those hires brought grants with them.

THE RESEARCH FUNDING GAP

• NCI clinical bar: New CCSG applicants must show $10 million in cancer research funding, or $6 million for a basic center.
• UMMC NIH total, early 2025: $3.8 million in active federal NIH cancer-related grants, per Mississippi Today’s review of public data.
• NCI’s own share then: $500,000, the slice designation committees watch most closely.
• New NCI award, August 2026: Nearly $2.6 million for metastasis research led by Dr. Jawed Siddiqui, a separate science grant from the lab-renovation money.

UMMC announced the Siddiqui award on August 10, four days before the NIST news. WJTV reported the project studies prostate cancer that has spread to bone; Siddiqui is an associate professor of cell and molecular biology. That NCI check is the kind of peer-reviewed science dollar the designation process actually counts. It is also a multi-year award, so it should not be dropped on top of the 2025 NIH total as if the center had suddenly cleared $6 million a year.

The Legislature had already raised its own cancer-center appropriation to $9 million in the period covered by the 2025 reporting, a jump of nearly $5 million, for research infrastructure, trials and recruiting. Buildings and state line items help. They do not replace the $10 million peer-reviewed floor.

Mississippi Patients Still Cross State Lines

Hyde-Smith’s statement noted there is still no NCI-designated cancer center in Mississippi, Louisiana or Arkansas, so patients often travel long distances for advanced care. Mississippi Today named Memphis, Birmingham, Dallas and Houston as the usual destinations. The NCI directory of NCI-designated cancer centers by state puts named options next door.

• Birmingham: O’Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Alabama’s only NCI comprehensive center.
• Memphis: St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, an NCI comprehensive center focused on pediatric cancer.
• Nashville: Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, another comprehensive center in Tennessee.
• Houston: The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, among the highest-volume NCI centers in the country.

UMMC’s campaign site says Mississippi has the highest rate of cancer deaths in the United States, and that in some parts of the state people are dying of cancer at a higher rate than anywhere else in the world. The American Cancer Society’s 2026 estimates put Mississippi at 18,080 new cancer cases and 6,740 deaths this year. Mississippi Today, citing Kaiser Family Foundation figures, reported the state’s cancer death rate is 25 percent above the national average, with cancer the second leading cause of death.

Long-distance travel is not a real option for many of those patients, the campaign site says, and some advanced therapies are not offered in the state. An NCI badge would not move every case home. It would change which trials open in Jackson, which specialists can be recruited, and which insurers and referring doctors treat UMMC as a destination rather than a stop on the way to Birmingham or Houston.

Why the Bid Has Taken 14 Years

UMMC has wanted the designation since 2012, when it expected the work to take five years, the Jackson Free Press reported at the time, according to Mississippi Today. Fourteen years later the medical center is still in the run-up to an application. Patrice Guilfoyle, a UMMC spokesperson, told the paper in 2025 that the bid is “the top priority of the University of Mississippi Medical Center, with staunch support from executive leadership,” and declined to say what blocked it beyond leadership changes and COVID-19.

1. 1964: UMMC hosts the heart transplant that Guest still cites as the start of its national medical standing.
2. 2012: The medical center begins seeking NCI designation and then expects a five-year path.
3. 2017: Dr. John Ruckdeschel arrives as cancer center director after leading Moffitt Cancer Center to NCI designation in 1998.
4. 2020: Ruckdeschel retires and writes that he cannot see “a genuine institutional commitment to cancer care and cancer research at UMMC.”
5. 2021: UMMC closes a community outreach program that former faculty said would have met an NCI outreach requirement.
6. 2023: Rocconi becomes director and calls the remaining work a long, heavy lift that could take as long as a decade.
7. March-April 2026: The private campaign says it has $100 million of $125 million, and Reeves signs $100 million in state construction money.
8. August 10-14, 2026: NCI awards nearly $2.6 million for metastasis research, then Hyde-Smith and Guest announce the $2.4 million NIST lab grant.

Ruckdeschel had previously helped the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Center in Detroit regain NCI status. In Jackson, he said the Legislature cut the cancer center’s appropriation from $5 million to $4.25 million the year he arrived, and that grant dollars rarely cover salaries and labs. “You have to make a pretty major commitment from the University,” he told Mississippi Today. “And they’ve just never been willing to do that.”

NCI-designated centers must also run community outreach. Michael Stefanek, former associate director of the closed 2021 program, said it had focused on screenings and on gaps in prevention and treatment. Roy Duhe, another former faculty member, said he “saw no reason to close that program.” Guilfoyle declined to say why it ended and said screening and disparity work continues. On August 19, the cancer center said free lung cancer screenings are now open for uninsured and underinsured Mississippians through a partnership with the American Lung Association, a small rebuild of the outreach line NCI still grades.

What the New Labs Still Have to Recruit

Dr. LouAnn Woodward is vice chancellor for health affairs and dean of the UMMC School of Medicine. She wrote in 2022 that gaining NCI designation was an “ethical imperative,” and she repeated the case at a legislative budget hearing.

With Mississippi’s health outcomes in cancer being as terrible as they are, we are committed to working towards this NCI designation. It is the thing that will change cancer outcomes in Mississippi.

Dr. LouAnn Woodward, vice chancellor for health affairs, UMMC legislative budget hearing

Dr. Barry Sleckman directs the O’Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center at UAB, one of the first NCI-designated centers in the country and still the only one in Alabama. He told Mississippi Today the application process is like an “ultra marathon.” Rocconi used a plainer phrase, a “long, heavy lift,” and said the main focus of UMMC is toward cancer because “our patients and our state need it.”

A renovated Research Wing can house the people those sentences assume. It cannot substitute for the $10 million in cancer grants, the rest of the faculty search, or the 250,000 square feet still being financed. UMMC is the only institution in the state that can even try for the badge, Woodward told the Senate Appropriations Committee in January, because a successful file needs research horsepower the rest of Mississippi’s hospitals do not carry.

The $2.4 million will buy equipment and a long-delayed redo of 14,000 square feet. The harder climb is still the one that started in 2012: enough science money, enough faculty, and a building that finally puts Mississippi patients on the same campus as an NCI-grade lab.