$1 billion is just the beginning.
Or call it the middle: the second act of an ongoing blockbuster Orange County hospitals have been writing recently, the one where a community of business bands together to battle a common enemy—cancer—and if their plan works pretty much everyone ends up heroic.
The developing City of Hope campus at Great Park Neighborhoods in Irvine and its stated $1 billion investment in the project is only the latest action-packed chapter.
City of Hope’s work will make it one of the area’s three largest treatment centers for cancer, joining:
• UCI Medical Center in Orange, the largest hospital in OC by net patient revenue (see list, page 30). UCI takes claim to being the only National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center in OC.
• Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach, OC’s second-largest hospital. Hoag is said to be readying a push to expand its cancer work, though specifics are still under wraps. Hoag says it has the largest cancer program in Southern California outside of Los Angeles, and plans to grow significantly.
There’s more than just those three, however. Other notable spokes include:
• Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, which opened an $80 million cancer center in November. It is the largest cancer-focused center to open in South OC.
• CHOC Children’s Hospital in Orange provides pediatric oncology, extending OC cancer care to all ages.
• OC’s No. 3 hospital, Kaiser Permanente, which has a 16,000-square-foot radiation oncology center in Anaheim, and Fountain Valley’s MemorialCare (see story, page 1) also play a large part in cancer treatment locally.
Overall efforts encompass most of the OC economy—real estate, technology, finance, education, and nonprofits, as well as healthcare.
Startups get into the act as well (see story, this page), as do local charities: OC chapters of global groups and earnest local efforts such as Kure It Inc. in Irvine, which funds research; Pediatric Cancer Research Foundation, also in Irvine; and Breast Cancer Angels in Los Alamitos.
The Players
Mission Hospital’s push includes the Leonard Cancer Institute. The $80 million effort opened last fall and was led by an estimated $25 million gift from Bill and Judi Leonard to the hospital’s foundation, the largest in its history.
The Leonards’ first gift to the hospital, in 1999, was $100; they made about two dozen gifts over the next two decades.
Treatment includes an emphasis on genetic testing and therapy, and bringing research and clinical trials to OC. It also works with companies involved in cancer treatment, such as Irvine-based OncoCyte Corp. (see story, page 13).
Mission’s work, adjacent to the Shops at Mission Viejo shopping center, is one of two new centers in OC. City of Hope opened a Newport Beach outpatient cancer facility near Fashion Island last month.
“This is the first piece of a billion-dollar network,” City of Hope OC President Annette Walker told the Business Journal at the time of the opening.
“The commitment is serious [and] City of Hope is answering the call” in OC.
The group’s much bigger campus at Great Park Neighborhoods will open a surgery center and second outpatient clinic next year—“most cancer treatment is outpatient,” Walker said—with the full layout expected by 2024.
It will include research and lab space, treatment, diagnostic, surgery, precision medicine, outpatient and other work; and palliative care, among other components.
A long-term goal for the area is to develop a reputation over time akin to, for instance, the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. That’s admittedly still years away, but a challenge worth attempting, industry execs say.
City of Hope oncologist Dr. Sumanta Kumar Pal said he’s often talked with patients—he graduated from college at 17 and specializes in bladder, kidney and prostate oncology—about the value of local treatment.
“It’s not unusual for people to travel for cancer care,” including from out of state, he said. But “cancer centers in [a patient’s] own area” are valuable.
Author! Author!
According to its website, Hoag Family Cancer Center treats two dozen different types of cancer and says it is “Orange County’s largest provider of radiation therapy and cancer care,” with 4,000 new patients a year.
In December, Hoag said it was one of only a few U.S. hospitals to begin using ion robot-assisted bronchoscopy to boost “accuracy and precision of lung cancer biopsy.”
Two months prior had come even bigger news: best-selling author and Hoag patient Dean Koontz and his wife, Gerda, pledged $9.1 million to support a radiation oncology center, named for them. It was the sixth-largest charitable gift in OC last year; see the Feb. 10 print edition of the Business Journal for more details.
The new center will be one of only two in California to use an MRI-guided radiation therapy system, Hoag said in a statement. Technology advances include “streaming real-time imaging of the radiation target” during treatment, not previously available.
Long Story
UCI Health’s Chao Comprehensive Cancer Center has been around for three decades, backed by massive regular and ongoing research at the university, as well as local givers.
Notable backers include Ralph and Sue Stern, who gave $5 million in 2014.
Ralph Stern founded OC dental implant maker Steri-Oss Inc., later sold to Bausch & Lomb, and CareCredit, a finance company for medical procedures, later sold to GE Capital. Sue Stern was treated for spinal cancer at UCI.
The Sterns’ gift helped support Chao hiring Dr. Richard Van Etten, a pioneering leukemia specialist as director.
“I saw an opportunity there for my wife and me to make the gift,” Stern told the Business Journal at the time.
Van Etten still leads the center, noting, “comprehensive care” is a designation earned by only about 50 hospitals in the U.S. He also offered an interesting tweak on the travel-for-treatment trend.
While OC’s growth as a cancer hub could mean fewer people needing to travel outside the county for treatment, the area is already a place where people come in for care.
Cancer patients, he said, come to OC for “clinical trials … not available elsewhere” or “just for a second opinion.”
With more and growing area centers over the next several years, that figure looks likely to grow.
Act Three
If the film of OC’s cancer-fighting quest were rolling credits now, there’d be a lot of names scrolling by. Among the luminaries: Masimo Corp. Chief Executive Joe Kiani, who will get some props March 21 at City of Hope’s “Let’s Be Frank About Cancer” gala at Hotel Irvine.
Then there are the go-to-work-daily CEOs of hospitals and centers—the Richard Van Ettens and Annette Walkers of the world, with business partners such as FivePoint CEO Emile Haddad and donors along the lines of the Leonards and Koontzes and Sterns.
The biggest part of the cast of course includes cancer patients and loved ones, and yes, some die in the end.
But the story isn’t over yet.
Walker and Haddad, for instance, in planning the biggest healthcare development here in over a decade, expect a new generation of healthcare advances to grow from and with and around the investment Orange Countians make on these projects, in addition to treating more people with cancer.
And CEOs are careful to note that means regardless of who those patients are.
Among other elements, for instance, Mission Hospital’s Leonard Institute includes a chapel.
Mission CEO Seth Teigen said the “Sisters of St. Joseph … our faith-based heritage” are vital to the work. “We’re here to take care of the poor and vulnerable; we’re here to take care of the community.”
