Tom Hornaday is, by all accounts, a constructive griever. Having lost his mother to breast cancer when he was a freshman in college, and his 26-year-old daughter Kristi to malignant melanoma in 1993, the Scottsdale developer's resolve to battle cancer has resulted in the construction of a new $25 million research building in Scottsdale, which will be shared by the Mayo Clinic and Translational Genomics Research Institute to conduct clinical research on cancer. Hornaday, president of Hornaday Development, personally funded its construction.

The 110,000-square-foot Mayo Clinic Collaborative Research Building, which opened June 30, 2005, is located just south of the main clinic facility on Shea Rd. It will house TGen Drug Development (TD2) and the TGen Cancer Drug Development Laboratory, as well as offices and labs for Mayo researchers working on different types of cancer, including melanoma and pancreatic cancer.

During the course of Kristi's treatment, Hornaday, who served on the board of the Arizona Cancer Center in Tucson, grew to know TGen Vice President Dr. Daniel Von Hoff, who brought him into the T-Gen Mayo collaboration project in 2002. "When someone you dearly love is fighting the battle against cancer, you want to do everything you can to help in that battle," Hornaday told Mayo Magazine last fall. "My hope, my prayer, and my belief is that the research conducting in this building will result in treatments that will provide cures so others will not experience these same kinds of untimely loss."

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For more information:

"Mayo facility aims to develop cures for diseases," East Valley Tribune, 07/01/2005

"Mayo Clinic research site joining biotech corridor," Arizona Republic, 06/30/2005

"Mayo Clinic-T-Gen research facility dedicated," Business Journal, 06/30/2005

Mayo Clinic news release

TGen Website