August 2008 Welcome to eFYI, your exclusive monthly e-newsletter from Greater Louisville Inc. - The Metro Chamber of Commerce. As one of our valued partners, you can count on eFYI to cover the topics and issues of most interest and benefit to you. Share your comments and ideas with us any time at VFisher@greaterlouisville.com. Ford confirms SUVs, small cars for Louisville plants Kentucky Trailer to stay in state Sealed Air Corp. selects Louisville for manufacturing facility Abramson, others seek to lure ex-Louisvillians back to city U of L study finds HPV vaccine may help prevent other cancers Louisville hotels prosper, bucking national trend Gheens Foundation donates $2 million for JCPS innovation center Louisville diabetes researcher receives $1.3 million NIH grant Creative hub destined for Wayside buildings Brown Cancer Center to get grant Louisville surgeons perform hand transplant at Jewish Hospital U of L gets $10.3 million grant for Birth Defects Center U of L licenses cancer vaccine U of L medical school campus continues to grow Ford confirms SUVs, small cars for Louisville plants Ford Motor confirmed it will start building the Expedition and Lincoln Navigator at the Kentucky Truck Plant and small cars at the Louisville Assembly Plant. Ford said production of the Ford Expedition and Lincoln Navigator will be moved to the Kentucky Truck Plant early next year. Louisville Assembly Plant, which builds the Ford Explorer mid-size sport utility vehicle, will be converted to produce small vehicles about the size of Ford's Focus compact car beginning in 2011. Kentucky has been working with Ford to tailor lucrative tax incentives approved last year by the General Assembly. Last fall, Ford took advantage of the incentives in agreeing to invest $200 million at Kentucky Truck and get about $60 million in tax savings over the next decade. Read more. Return to article index Kentucky Trailer to stay in state Kentucky Trailer announced that it would move to a new location in Louisville rather than go to Corydon, Indiana. It will sell its South Third Street site to the University of Louisville and move to a 240,000-square-foot facility in the Jefferson Riverport Industrial complex. The decision by the company means it will keep 286 jobs in the state. It was approved for tax incentives if it adds 182 employees. R.C. Tway Co., which does business as Kentucky Trailer, manufactures custom-built truck trailers for the moving and storage, snack-food, package-delivery, auto-transport and mobile-medical industries. Read more. Return to article index Sealed Air Corp. selects Louisville for manufacturing facility Sealed Air Corp., a maker of packaging materials and equipment, will open a 100-employee manufacturing facility in Louisville. The Elmwood, N.J.-based company, which makes products such as Bubble Wrap and Jiffy Protective mailers, will lease 415,000 square feet in the Louisville Industrial Center. Sealed Air Corp. which plans to invest more than $11 million in the Louisville plant, should be at full production sometime in the first quarter of 2009. Read more. Return to article index Abramson, others seek to lure ex-Louisvillians back to city Armed with bottles of bourbon, Kentucky Derby tickets and jobs, Mayor Jerry Abramson threw a party in Tampa, Florida to lure young professionals to Louisville. The goal of the Louisville Reunion is to recruit people with a Louisville connection to move back home. This was the sixth year for the Abramson recruitment forays to other cities. He has previously visited San Francisco, Dallas, Atlanta and Chicago (twice). Read more. Return to article index U of L study finds HPV vaccine may help prevent other cancers Some people might be able to avoid head and neck cancer if they receive a special vaccine that protects against the human papillomavirus, according to a researcher at the University of Louisville's James Graham Brown Cancer Center. Dr. A. Bennett Jenson was part of a recent study at U of L that found that the human papillomavirus was present in about one-third of the head and neck cancer cases. Those results, presented at a May conference of the American College of Physicians, suggest that the current vaccine Gardasil which protects against some HPV strains, could prevent some people from developing head and neck cancers. Read more. Return to article index Louisville hotels prosper, bucking national trend At a time when high fuel prices and a weak economy are causing some national hotel chains to struggle, the Louisville market is having one of its best years in recent history. The average cost of a local hotel room rose to $96.12 a night for the first five months of the year, a 5.5 percent increase from a year earlier, according to Smith Travel Research. Occupancy rates at area hotels improved slightly during the same period, the group said, even as the national occupancy rate fell more than 2 percent. Read more. Return to article index Gheens Foundation donates $2 million for JCPS innovation center The Jefferson County Public Schools system has received a $2 million gift from the Gheens Foundation to help create a center for innovation intended to increase student and teacher performance. The gift will be paid over five years and will fund the Gheens Institute for Innovation in Education within the Gheens Academy, which houses the district's curriculum and instruction department. Carl Thomas, executive director of the Gheens Foundation Inc., Kentucky's second-largest charitable foundation, said the initiative should serve as a catalyst for cutting-edge innovation for teachers and administrators. Read more. Return to article index Louisville diabetes researcher receives $1.3 million NIH grant Stuart Williams, a researcher at the Cardiovascular Innovation Institute, has received a $1.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study pancreatic cell transplants. If successful, the transplants could be used as a means for managing cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Read more. Return to article index Creative hub destined for Wayside buildings The purchase of Wayside Christian Mission's properties will be a catalyst for East Market Street to coalesce into a destination for Louisville's emerging creative class - a hub for the arts, cuisine, locally produced food, the green building movement, commerce and retail. That's the quickly evolving vision of the main investors involved in recasting East Market Street's art galleries and restaurants district as a larger zone dubbed "NuLu." Those investors, in several partnerships, include Los Angeles-based actor and Louisville native William Mapother, contractor Tim Peters and filmmaker Gill Holland and his wife, Augusta Brown Holland. With the pending purchase of the Wayside property - 10 buildings total from 800 E. Market through 820 E. Market - all of the pieces of a dramatic redevelopment puzzle are now on the table, waiting to be assembled. Read more. Return to article index Brown Cancer Center to get grant The James Graham Brown Cancer Center at University Hospital will receive a $10.1 million federal grant to continue research on cancer treatment and prevention. The grant from the National Institutes of Health is an extension of the $11 million, five-year grant the center got in 2003. The previous grant allowed nine researchers to work on projects involving different aspects of cancer, and the extension will allow those researchers to continue to develop their projects. One of those researchers, Dr. Jason Chesney, has discovered a drug that could allow the immune system to target and kill cancer cells in patients with advanced melanoma. Read more. Return to article index Louisville surgeons perform hand transplant at Jewish Hospital In July, Louisville surgeons performed the fourth hand transplant ever in the United States, giving an automotive shop manager from California a right hand for the first time in six years. A 20-member team spent 14 hours at Jewish Hospital operating on Dave Robert Armstrong who lost his hand when a gun he was using misfired in April 2002. The group of surgeons is a leader in hand transplants, performing the nation's first in 1999, followed by two others in 2001 and 2006. Read more. Return to article index U of L gets $10.3 million grant for Birth Defects Center The University of Louisville has received $10.3 million in federal funding from the National Institutes of Health for research being conducted at the university's Birth Defects Center. Of the funding, $8.8 million is a renewal of a grant awarded to the center and the University of Louisville School of Dentistry in 2002 to establish a Center of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE). The renewal grant will be distributed over a five-year period. The research being conducted by COBRE-funded scientists at the center focuses on medical concerns such as unlocking the mechanisms behind infertility and birth defects, spinal cord abnormalities, cleft palate and mental and physical defects related to smoking. Read more. Return to article index U of L licenses cancer vaccine The University of Louisville's cancer center has licensed technology for an inexpensive cervical cancer vaccine to a private company -- and officials say human testing could begin as soon as next year. The James Graham Brown Cancer Center licensed the drug -- produced in tobacco plants -- to Advanced Cancer Therapeutics, a private, for-profit company based in Louisville that brings anti-cancer therapies to market. The company has an arrangement with U of L allowing it to obtain exclusive worldwide licenses to therapies discovered at the cancer center. Read more. Return to article index U of L medical school campus continues to grow The building boom at the University of Louisville Health Sciences Center campus east of downtown is continuing. Construction has gotten under way on a $30.7 million, 1,700-space parking garage, and bids are being sought from private developers to construct a 10-story building to house offices for future U of L School of Medicine faculty. Those two projects are getting started at the same time two other major structures have been newly added to the landscape. The eight-story U of L Health Care Outpatient Center at Preston and Chestnut streets -- where medical and surgical faculty at the School of Medicine will see patients -- was just completed and is already partly occupied. And work on the $143 million Clinical and Translational Research Building at Hancock and Madison streets continues, with occupancy targeted for late next spring. Read more. Return to article index
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