The hospital that will change the story of cancer forever

  • 17th July 2024

An artist’s impression of how the new cancer hospital will look in the wider campus context. Image, NBBJ

Work will begin shortly on the construction of on a new hospital that will transform how we diagnose and treat cancer.

Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital will treat patients from across the East of England, but the research that takes place there promises to change the lives of cancer patients across the wider UK and beyond.

It has been designed by architects NBBJ and engineers AECOM and will be constructed by Laing O’Rourke.

Standing on the rooftop of the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, Professor Richard Gilbertson, director of the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre and research lead for Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital, points to an unassuming car park below, nestled between the institute and global pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca.

“That’s where the new hospital will be,” he says.

“It’s hard to envisage that, in just a few years time, this will be the location of Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital, a radical new hospital that promises to change the story of cancer forever.”

The hospital is being funded two thirds by the Government and a third by philanthropy, with £100m to be raised jointly by the University of Cambridge and Addenbrooke’s Charitable Trust.

The development – a collaboration between the University of Cambridge and Cambridge University Hospitals (CUH) NHS Foundation Trust – will have 77 single inpatient rooms, along with a significantly-expanded outpatient department and larger day patient unit.

But what really sets it apart is that, in the same building, alongside the patients and their medical teams, will be academic and industry researchers focused on delivering solutions that will transform the lives of millions of cancer patients – not just in the Cambridge and the East of England, but worldwide.

“At the moment, cancer affects one in two of us and is a diagnosis that induces fear in patients and their families,” said Gilbertson.

“But imagine a world where there is no longer a fear of cancer. That’s the world we’re trying to create.”

Dr Hugo Ford, head of cancer services at CUH and clinical lead for Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital, said that bringing academics and doctors together is about ‘maximising the clinical benefits, the real-world benefits of the research that’s done’.

He added: “We’re trying to bring in other communities from industry, from biotech, from other university departments, to build a much-wider community.”

Catching cancer early

One of the main focus areas for the new hospital is an area in which Cambridge has built unique expertise: early detection and intervention of cancer.

“We know that for a lot of cancers there is a latency period where the’’re either in a precancerous stage or in an early cancer stage before it can ever be diagnosed by conventional methods,” says Ford.

“Are there ways to detect the cancer at this early stage and intervene?”

Gilbertson said such an approach will present a ‘win-win’ for both patients and the NHS.

“If you detect the cancer early, the survival chances are much better and the treatment needed is generally easier and more straightforward,” he said.

“This is better for patients and much less expensive for the NHS.”

The top floor of the future hospital will house the Early Cancer Institute Research Clinic, headed by Professor Rebecca Fitzgerald, a clinical researcher who spends part of her time looking after patients with oesophageal cancer, a cancer that is difficult to treat if not caught early.

“We’re being much more proactive,” she said.

“We’re trying to predict who needs more-careful monitoring or preventative action ahead of them even knowing they’ve got a problem.”

This will make Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital the only hospital in the UK that has space specifically aimed at preventing cancer, she added.

Fitzgerald already heads the Early Cancer Institute across the Campus, which is undergoing redevelopment as the Li Ka Shing Early Cancer Institute to enable world-class fundamental research aimed at understanding how cancers emerge and develop, finding biomarkers to detect it, and developing new strategies to find people at risk and to intervene.

She said the new Research Clinic in the hospital will enable them to translate their discoveries into clinical practice.

On the top floor, it will have space for healthy and pre-symptomatic individuals to take part in studies as well as a hotel type of arrangement where researchers from across Cambridge and beyond – often from disciplines outside medicine, such as physics, engineering and maths – are able to spend a period of time working in partnership with patients to develop and test their innovations.

“The best way to really get research done in the most-efficient way is to have it right alongside the patient,” Fitzgerald said.

“The closer you can bring these things together, to really embed it in the whole ecosystem, it makes it easier for the researchers, it makes it easier for the patients.”

“Even some of the more-straightforward inventions that we’ve invented here, particularly in early detection, could have been developed years faster had scientists been located next to patients,” adds Gilbertson, who is also chairman of the NHS Innovation External Advisory Board.

“To change the story of cancer, there needs to be a seamless integration between research and NHS care.

“We’re seeking to take the very best of Cambridge science and make sure it’s ‘NHS ready’, ensuring it can be readily deployed in York, Hartlepool, Stockport, wherever, patients need it.”

Professor Rebecca Fitzgerald, a clinical researcher, says bringing clinical and research teams will help to improve cancer diagnosis and treatment

Kinder, faster treatments

While the ambition is to catch cancer early enough to cure it – and ultimately to intervene early enough to prevent it – there will always be patients needing more-intensive or longer-term treatment.

In the past, cancer treatments brought with them extremely-unpleasant side effects, but thanks to new generations of medicines and therapies – including so-called PARP inhibitors developed in Cambridge – treatments can be much more targeted, making them more effective and with fewer side effects.

Professor Jean Abraham directs the Precision Breast Cancer Institute, which will move into Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital.

Abraham and her team use the latest advances in genomics to better match treatment to particular changes in DNA that give rise to the tumour.

And, once a patient is undergoing treatment, they hope to monitor almost in real time how the tumour is responding and adjust as necessary.

“One of the great things that will happen when we get into the hospital is that we’ll have the Precision Breast Cancer Institute and side by side to that will be our NHS Breast Cancer Unit for our patients,” she said

Equally exciting is that next to these will be the Integrated Cancer Medicine Institute. There, researchers will look for ways to bring together the many different data sets collected from cancer patients – from DNA to blood tests and biopsies to medical imaging, for example – and apply artificial intelligence (AI) to guide treatment options.

Gilbertson says this will help them completely transform the currently ‘very clunky’ patient pathway that starts with the patient noticing something is wrong and getting referred by their GP to their local hospital where doctors will run a number of tests.

Listening to the voices of patients

Crucial to the development of Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital has been the involvement of patients.

Ensuring that their voices are heard as part of the design process is the responsibility of Elaine Chapman, the lead advisory nurse on the project and herself a person living with breast cancer.

“I see very much part of my role as helping us work out how we’re going to make this building work in practice on a day-to-day basis,” she said.

“So, for patients, that’s about thinking what experience, what things they might be feeling and thinking when they’re coming to the building, and how can we have an environment that will help them to feel comfortable?”

Chapman is the liaison with the Patient Advisory Group, co-chaired by Fiona Carey and Neil Stutchbury.

“We’re trying to change the experience for cancer patients and make it better,” said Carey, who took early retirement in 2012 following her third major surgery, which was for kidney metastases in the pancreas.

“You wouldn’t build a Cineplex without talking to people who are going to use it,” she said.

“If you have your patients around the table from the beginning, you’re going to avoid costly mistakes.”

Patients have been heavily involved in the design and building of the new hospital from the start, sitting on all the working groups alongside the professionals.

“We see things clinicians don’t see,” says Carey.

“We know things they don’t know. And patients aren’t just patients. They have skills and expertise. They might be engineers, architects, accountants, artists – we all bring stuff into the room beyond what would have been there without us.”

Patient groups have been involved in the hospital project since early in the process.

And this has resulted in important changes to the proposed design, such as having changing rooms and procedure rooms connected by a door rather than across a public corridor.

“We all know about gowns,” says Carey.

“The whole thing is really awkward. Should I wear shoes and socks? Is my bum hanging out the back? Now the design has been changed to remove that problem.”

Patients have been heavily involved in the design of the hospital

Great expectations

Work will begin imminently on the new hospital within the burgeoning Cambridge Biomedical Campus, which is itself located at the heart of the UK’s and Europe’s leading life sciences cluster.

It is anticipated that it will open its doors to patients, doctors, and researchers in 2029.

Chapman said: “We already do amazing things in Cambridge, but by having a new building that has been designed in partnership with patients, clinicians, and the university, we’ll improve the experience for those working in there and for our patients coming to it.”

Ford adds that, for the first time in his career, he looks forward to being able to offer people treatment in an environment that genuinely contributes to their health and wellbeing.

“There’s a lot of evidence about the impact of the environment on the patients,” he said.

“It makes a difference to how they feel about their treatments and it makes a big difference to the way that the staff approach their work.

“Ultimately, the environment makes a major contribution to successful patient outcomes.”

 

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