Construction is moving ahead on the $44 million building from Nevada Health & Bioscience Corp. — the same nonprofit behind UNLV’s Kirk Kerkorian Medical Education Building.
During a hard hat tour on Tuesday, NHBC showed off progress on the 34,000-square-foot, two-story laboratory and blood bank — the NHBC Academic Laboratory — at 1601 Pinto Lane, across from the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV.
The laboratory will help keep testing and healthcare services in Nevada, reducing the state’s reliance on out-of-state laboratories. It is expected to reduce wait times for diagnostic tests and treatments, keep healthcare dollars in the state and generate more than $5 million in annual community savings, according to NHBC.
Additionally, the lab will support UNLV’s medical school and potentially help set up hematology and pathology residency programs and fellowships.
“It will certainly help in educating and training the students who are coming out of the medical school,” said James Waddoups, president and CEO of NHBC. “But then the broader community will benefit from the quicker response times on testing, keeping that testing here in Nevada, not having to send it out of state, taking many days.”
Funding for the building comes from a $9 million city of Las Vegas general funds grant and $35 million from a State of Nevada American Rescue Plan Act grant. Completion is anticipated by the end of 2026, with tenants moving in by the first quarter of next year.
The building will house University Medical Center and another tenant, which will provide blood services that has yet to be announced, but are in the final stages of lease negotiation, according to Waddoups.
On the first floor, the blood services tenant and UMC will split the building east to west. The blood services tenant will be to the east, with a blood donation center, and UMC to the west, with its freezer farm, deliveries and other intake services on the first floor.
The second floor will be a specialized laboratory for UMC’s microbiology and virology, tuberculosis identification, stem cell processing, drug toxicology and a molecular lab services and testing.
The building will house Nevada’s first Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration-approved laboratory, which will offer high-complexity substance abuse testing.
Additionally, the laboratory will have “esoteric,” or unique tests, one of which only four labs in the country perform called Fungitell, said Deb LaCava, pathology director at UMC. The test can detect fungal infections and LaCava anticipates “everybody on the West Coast” will start sending their testing to the lab.
LaCava said currently the hospital sends out about 15 percent of tests, or around 1 million out of 7.5 million. The lab does not take samples from patients’ direction, but rather from its multiple contracts with hospitals, outside laboratories and even retirement homes to test samples at the new lab.
“We have an instrument that can test for (tuberculosis) in two hours,” said LaCava about one of the multiple new instruments at the lab. “It’s a DNA test, so we’ll be able to at least isolate that patient and begin to treat them instead of having to wait six weeks for it to come back.”
Contact Emerson Drewes at edrewes@reviewjournal.com. Follow @EmersonDrewes on X.
