HOUSTON, Texas — MD Anderson Cancer Center plans to spend $3.4 billion on two new buildings at its Texas Medical Center campus in Houston, a cancer treatment tower and a radiation and imaging center that together would add close to 2 million square feet of space.
Both buildings are planned where Fannin Street meets Holcombe Boulevard, which the hospital describes as the new front door of its campus. MD Anderson calls the project the largest capital expansion in its history, and it expects the pair of buildings to help it care for nearly 250,000 patients a year.
The larger of the two, Inspiration Tower, is planned at 25 floors and 1.4 million square feet and is scheduled to open in 2032. MD Anderson says it will be the biggest cancer-focused clinical building in the country. The plans include up to 330 exam rooms and 184 beds for short stays. Surgery space would total 24 operating rooms, with 38 more rooms set aside for procedures, along with 56 rooms for imaging and 162 stations for outpatient treatment.
The second building, Prism, would open first, in 2030. At 292,000 square feet, it will focus on radiation oncology and diagnostic imaging and is designed to see up to 150,000 patients a year. The hospital expects it to handle close to half of all linear accelerator work in the medical center. On the imaging side, it is slated to hold a dozen MRI machines plus four CT scanners and two PET-CT units. For radiation treatment, the plans list 18 vaults and seven simulators.
Counting other construction already underway, the hospital says its Texas Medical Center footprint, which stood at 16.4 million square feet in 2020, should reach close to 22 million square feet by 2032.
MD Anderson ties the expansion to rising demand for cancer care as the state grows, and says the buildings are designed so new tools such as artificial intelligence and robotics can be added over time. Both projects are priorities of the hospital’s $2.5 billion fundraising campaign, which it says has raised more than $2.22 billion so far.
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