$100 million gift from Herb Chambers gives hospital great impetus for $400 million cancer care investment
Mass General Brigham (MGB) is heading off its impending breakup with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute by investing approximately $400 million into a four-year facility renovation expanding the system’s cancer care capabilities, President and CEO Anne Klibanski, M.D., told employees.
That money will also go toward recruitment of “top oncologists” to the organization and greater clinical support staffing, according to an internal letter announcing the plans and other materials provided to press.
Also on the roadmap is the implementation of a digital pathology platform; investment into patient navigation resources and support; establishing new office, research and clinical spaces for teams that are currently housed at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; and the adoption of other software upgrades and harmonization “in areas like radiation oncology and patient access,” the system said.
The plans are in line with MGB’s work over the past year-plus to establish Mass General Brigham Cancer, its in-house replacement for long-time cancer care partner Dana-Farber.
The latter had announced in 2023 that it would build the Boston region’s first independent, freestanding cancer hospital in partnership with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center— ending an arrangement its held with MGB’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital since the late 1990s to house inpatient oncology and surgical cancer care.
In her letter, Klibanski told employees MGB is kicking off its cancer investments and renovations “with the goal of ensuring that MGB Cancer is fully operational using our own resources, ready to serve patients before the conclusion of our current agreement with Dana-Farber in fall 2028.”
The renovation work will refresh three floors of Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s Hale Building for Transformative Medicine and one floor of its Faulkner Hospital, which Klibanski said would support outpatient services including infusion.
The system noted in a release that the Hale Building is among the organization’s most technologically advanced having opened in 2016, and that housing cancer capabilities there “will facilitate collaboration across expert teams (such as specialists in our Neuroscience Institute who are co-located in the Hale Building).”
The renovations go hand-in-hand with work the system has already started at Massachusetts General Hospital, where a newly dubbed Herb Chambers Towers (reflecting a recent $100 million gift from New England car dealership chain owner Herb Chambers) inside the Phillip and Susan Ragon Building will focus on cancer care. MGB also highlighted plans to add a new exam room and infusion services capacity at Massachusetts General Hospital-Waltham.
“Bringing the unmatched resources of our two great academic medical centers and our entire system together, we are one against cancer, building a brighter future for cancer care at Mass General Brigham,” Klibanski said.
MGB said the system will “focus on ensuring continuity of patient care” amid the transition from Dana-Farber to Mass General Brigham Cancer over the next few years.
The cancer investments come as MGB executives execute a broader restructuring of its clinical and academic teams. That multiyear process, announced in March 2024, seeks to more closely tie the flagship Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s experts within singular departments, which MGB said would improve care coordination.
More immediately, the announcement comes just over a week after MGB executed its second wave of mass nonclinical layoffs.
The nonprofit, which is Massachusetts’ largest private employer, said the cuts were necessary to close a $250 million two-year budget gap and are expected to save more than $200 million per year. MGB has so far declined to put a total number on this year’s layoffs, though The Boston Globe, citing unnamed sources, reports that roughly 1,500 positions out of the system’s 82,000 will be affected.