The research city now: the Mirro Center

2015–PRESENT · THE INSTITUTIONAL PRESENT TENSE

The center: The modern layer of this record is institutional, and its anchor is Parkview Health's Mirro Center for Research and Innovation, which opened in April 2015 on the Parkview Regional Medical Center campus: a $20 million, 82,000-square-foot building that folded in a Parkview Research Center then already twenty-five years old. In its first decade the center ran more than 400 clinical trials; its hyperlocal model predicting the spread of COVID-19 across northeast Indiana was taken up by the Indiana Department of Health, and a clinic the center organized vaccinated more than 157,000 people, in Parkview's ten-year account of the institution. The city's university laboratories — Purdue University Fort Wayne's and Indiana Tech's among them — run research programs of their own, entered here only as the frame, with specifics left to their own records. The section closes where it began: the works laboratories of the preceding entries — L3Harris's instrument shops, Fort Wayne Metals' materials research — are the present tense of the same Fort Wayne habit, a city that has been turning local knowledge into working things since a druggist compounded a powder at Columbia and Calhoun in 1865.

Sources:

1. Becker's Hospital Review and Indiana Chamber / Parkview releases (2015; November 2025) — the Mirro Center's April 2015 opening, $20 million cost, 82,000 square feet, the research center's 25 years.
2. Journal Gazette account of the center's first decade, via Parkview's ten-year summary — the 400-plus clinical trials, the COVID-19 prediction model and the state health department, the 157,000 vaccinations.