UCI Health Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center Annual Report 2024
The future of cancer care is here
These are truly exciting times for the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center and UCI Health. In 2024 alone, we made extraordinary strides to achieve our vision: to prevent, manage and cure cancer so that all people in Orange County and beyond live healthier, longer lives.
The 225,000-square-foot Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center in Irvine effectively triples the clinical space for treating patients. We opened a radiation oncology center in Fountain Valley, an Outpatient Imaging Center in Orange and more infusion services in Yorba Linda and Laguna Hills.
In addition, UCI Health has become one of the largest academic health systems in California with the acquisition of four community hospitals, whose patients we now serve as the only Orange County-based comprehensive cancer center designated by the National Cancer Institute.
Our remarkable growth will continue in the year ahead when the Falling Leaves Foundation Medical Innovation Building opens on the UC Irvine campus. There, basic scientists and clinicians will gain more than 20,000 square feet of the most modern lab facilities on the West Coast. These labs and their proximity to dozens of other leading UC Irvine scientists will further propel the cancer center’s groundbreaking research, which generated more than $80 million in extramural grant funding in 2024.
We’ve hired more than 30 new cancer specialists, including many nationally regarded senior clinician-scientists, with more to come.
We’re excited about an upcoming clinical trial of a novel immunotherapy approach that has the potential to extend the benefit of CAR T-cell therapy to patients with solid tumors. This technology was developed in the laboratory of one of our scientists and is currently being advanced as part of the National Cancer Institute’s Experimental Therapeutics (NExT) Program.
Through our collaboration with the Susan Samueli Integrative Health Institute, we have long led the way in providing integrative medicine services to our cancer patients. In 2025, we’ll expand those supportive services and introduce a new Integrative Oncology Program leader, Dr. Gary Deng, who will join us in the spring from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York.
I couldn’t be prouder of the cancer center’s Office of Community Outreach and Engagement (COE), which has expanded care to underserved communities through partnerships with local organizations, CalOptima and our federally qualified Family Healthcare Centers.
And we are grateful to the Orange County community for embracing the UCI Anti-Cancer Challenge, an annual walk, run and ride event to support the research of our own cancer scientists and clinical investigators to bring an end to cancer. On Oct. 5, the eighth annual rally raised a record$1.5 million, bringing the total since 2017 to $6.2 million. Every penny has gone to fund more than 100 pilot projects and early phase clinical trials at UCI and our pediatric cancer partner, CHOC Children’s, that are poised to revolutionize cancer diagnosis, treatment and care.
Sincerely,
Richard A. Van Etten, MD, PhD
Director, Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center Senior Associate Dean and Associate Vice Chancellor for Cancer, UC Irvine
Richard Van Etten, MD, PhD shares a year of advancements in cancer care
UCI Medical Center is committed to excellence and research in cancer care.