Nonprofit cancer research and treatment center City of Hope received a $50 million gift from the Lennar Foundation to expedite the previously announced creation of a $1 billion comprehensive cancer campus in Irvine, California.
City of Hope has been developing a 190,000-square-foot cancer center facility to house an outpatient cancer care center and a clinical research center in FivePoint Holdings' Great Park Neighborhoods in Irvine. Construction is underway on the cancer center, which is slated to open in 2022.
The cancer center facility will be named The Lennar Foundation Cancer Center at City of Hope Orange County, officials said. It will bring increased access to providers and clinical trials to cancer patients as well as advanced treatment options for fighting the most aggressive cancers, officials said.
Cancer Center at City of Hope Orange County.
The 190,000-square-foot cancer center facility,
which will house an outpatient cancer care center
and a clinical research center in FivePoint Holdings'
Great Park Neighborhoods, will open in 2022.
(City of Hope)
The Lennar Foundation is the charitable arm of homebuilder Lennar Corp.
“A gift of this magnitude isn’t for naming a building, though we will name our cancer center after the Lennar Foundation. It’s really about accelerating the speed with which lifesaving therapies are developed and made available to patients who need them," City of Hope President and CEO Robert Stone told Fierce Healthcare.
RELATED: City of Hope announces $1B cancer campus in Orange County, California
City of Hope plans to open an inpatient specialty hospital—which will be Orange County's only hospital dedicated exclusively to treating cancer—by 2025 adjacent to the outpatient site.
Market research has shown almost 20% of patients from Orange County who need advanced cancer care leave the county for their care. About 4,000 of those patients a year end up at City of Hope’s Duarte campus, Stone said.
“But that requires, depending on the time of day and where you are in the county, up to a couple of hours each way driving when you’re fatigued from fighting cancer. This will allow it all to happen in the county itself,” Stone said. “What we’re, in essence, doing is building a second campus.”
When initially announced, City of Hope planned to open the new campus in mid-2021. The COVID-19 pandemic shifted that timeline somewhat due to challenges faced by the contractors on the project, Stone said. The gift will not impact the facility's construction, which was already well underway, Stone said.
“The gift is really about how quickly can the programs be up and running and how robust are those programs? This will allow us to accelerate the phase 1, 2 and 3 clinical trials and their availability in Irvine. It will allow us to build a different level of early detection and prevention program," he said. "Equally as important, it will allow us to accelerate one of our unique programs around supportive care … not just of the whole patient, but the family as well.”
The gift could support the potential further expansion of the campus in the future to add additional research facilities, Stone said, although none of those plans have been solidified.
Stone said the new campus is expected to draw doctors from its Duarte campus as well as the local community, but they also expect to launch national recruitment efforts.
“Over the last five to seven years—and COVID has only accelerated this—doctors and scientists who have dedicated their lives to conquering cancer are attracted to organizations that solely focus on cancer.”
A portion of the gift to City of Hope is designated to support clinical translational research between City of Hope and the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami to unite the two organizations which are both supported by Lennar. Stone called it a pilot project research collaboration that will focus on treating different types of cancers with a focus on health equities.
“At Lennar, we are committed to building communities, and we are pleased to support City of Hope to help build the future of cancer care," said Stuart Miller, executive chairman of Lennar Corporation, in a statement. "Together, we are building a state-of-the-art center for advanced cancer care and research that will make a difference in the lives of so many by turning science into practice and hope into reality.”