About the Hillman Cancer Center
In September 1999, the UPCI and the UPMC broke ground for the Hillman Cancer Center (HCC), named for the generous gift of Henry L. Hillman and the Hillman Foundation. The HCC, which opened in August 2002, is located on a two-acre campus adjacent to UPMC Shadyside hospital, about 1.5 miles from Oakland, the home of the University of Pittsburgh.
The HCC houses clinical, basic research, and population sciences faculty. Approximately 200 UPCI faculty members, from a wide variety of academic departments of the School of Medicine, Pharmacy, Graduate School of Public Health, and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, are located within the HCC complex. Clinician-scientists include members from the departments of Medicine, Radiation Oncology, Surgery, Pathology, Neurology, Radiology, Obstetrics and Gynecology, and Psychiatry. Basic Science faculty include members from the departments of Pathology, Immunology, Cell Biology, Radiation Oncology, Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry, Pharmacology, Radiology, Environmental and Occupational Health, Surgery, Medicine, Psychiatry, and Dermatology. Population Sciences faculty include members from the departments of Epidemiology, Psychiatry, Psychology, and Medicine.
In keeping with the goals of integrating research and clinical care, The HCC is also the core for patient care services offered by the UPMC Cancer Centers. HCC houses a state-of-the-art outpatient facility as serving as the hub of UPCI’s cancer network, with regional cancer care facilities and hospital-based programs constituting the spokes. With this system in place, UPCI offers nearly six million western Pennsylvania residents access to the latest resources in cancer prevention, detection, diagnosis, and treatment services. These services are urgently needed in a region whose population is aging and facing a growing cancer burden.
The three-level, 178,000-square-foot Research Pavilion houses the research laboratories, support services, and offices of the majority of the UPCI’s basic research cancer scientists. This pavilion incorporates an open laboratory design and clusters of offices with adjacent informal meeting space to facilitate interactions among research teams. The majority of the faculty in each of the basic research programs of UPCI (i.e., immunology, molecular virology, molecular and cellular oncology, and molecular therapeutics and drug discovery) have laboratories in this new facility. In addition, the majority of the faculty in the translational/clinical and disease-site programs have their laboratories there. Core resources housed within the Research Pavilion include the Animal Facility, Immunologic Monitoring Laboratory (IML) and Cellular Products Laboratory (CPL), the Flow Cytometry Facility, the Hematopoietic Stem Cell Facility, and a Biosafety Level–3 laboratory (BSL-3). A conference room is located on each floor of the Research Pavilion to better facilitate further collaborations among investigators. The HCC's William M. Cooper Pavilion, which is the ambulatory care pavilion, is a 185,000-square-foot, five-story facility housing comprehensive, integrated clinical services, including those related to treatment, prevention and early detection, nutrition, education, genetic counseling, behavioral medicine, pain control and palliative care, and cancer rehabilitation. The top floor of the Cooper Pavilion houses the offices of the UPCI Clinical Research Services, thus providing very close proximity of the clinical research coordinators and data managers to the outpatient treatment floors.
The UPMC Cancer Pavilion, a 100,000-square-foot, five-story facility adjacent to the HCC, houses offices for the Director and senior leadership of UPCI and UPMC Cancer Centers, and also faculty and fellows offices for the Hematology/Oncology Division, Department of Radiation Oncology, Division of Surgical Oncology, and a substantial portion of the members of the Cancer Epidemiology and Cancer Control Program. It is connected to the Hillman Cancer Center by a pedestrian bridge that offers convenient access to both buildings across a busy city street. The UPMC Cancer Pavilion also houses the Benedum Oncology Informatics Center, Development and Community Affairs, and the Herberman Conference Center. The Benedum Oncology Informatics Center, which includes the Cancer Informatics Services, occupies approximately 20,000 square feet in the building and is proximal to the UPMC Cancer Registry, which records cancer diagnoses for all of the UPMC hospitals. The Herberman Conference Center, which seats 400, consists of a large conference room equipped with state-of-the-art audiovisual equipment and four smaller meeting rooms. The facility has video teleconferencing capabilities to enable communication with other University or UPMC facilities as well as institutions across the nation, and is highly utilized for conferences, workshops, and for the UPCI Annual Scientific Retreat.
Significant effort has been made to ensure that the HCC interacts effectively with the academic and professional activities of the academic campus in Oakland. Faculty members continue to retain their appointment and responsibilities in the one of the six Schools of Health Sciences or other departments in the Faculty of Arts & Sciences (FAS) that are all located on the Oakland campus. Continuous shuttle service provides convenient travel between the two campuses. Graduate students enrolled in the University of Pittsburgh rotate through laboratories of faculty in the Hillman Cancer Center as a part of their program. Seminar series at both campuses are widely attended. For an increasing portion of seminar series, videoconferencing directly connects the seminar presentation room on either campus with a viewing room on the other campus.
In addition to the new research space available at HCC, the University is constructing a Biomedical Science Tower III (BST3) on the Oakland campus. Slated to open in April 2005, the BST3 will house 50 research groups, including UPCI’s Molecular Therapeutics and Drug Discovery Program and other basic research activities focused on structural biology and genetics, in about 300,000 gross feet of space. Entire floors of the facility will be devoted to developing new drug therapies and pharmaceuticals, neuroscience, stem cell and tissue engineering, nanotechnology, proteomics, and computational biology.