New Center for Cancer Care for Newark

Cancer is a disease that doesn’t travel well," says William N. Hait, MD, PhD, director of The Cancer Institute of New Jersey (CINJ) on the UMDNJ New Brunswick campus. "It’s a chronic disease that requires weekly and monthly visits for years." To eliminate long-distance care for northern New Jersey patients, a new $100 million cancer center in Newark, called the New Jersey Medical School–University Hospital Cancer Center and affiliated with CINJ, is expected to open in late 2004. Ground-breaking for the seven-story building, about to go up on the corner of South Orange Avenue and Bergen Street, was held on July 26. Offering patient care on the first three floors and research on the top four, the Center will consolidate all University Hospital (UH) outpatient cancer services. The Center’s design will also allow patients to enter the building from the medical school as well as the hospital. Says Sidney Mitchell, UH president and CEO, "It will offer a humanistic approach to treatment…one person and one family at a time." The new facility will also work with UMDNJ’s Institute for the Elimination of Health Disparities because cancer death rates are higher than average in minority groups. "There’s a lot of hard work ahead, but this is the right thing to do," says NJMS Dean Russell T. Joffe, MD.