University of Chicago Medicine has received a $75 million donation from the AbbVie Foundation to help it build its massive new cancer hospital on the city’s South Side.
The money will go toward construction of UChicago Medicine’s new freestanding hospital — a 575,000-square-foot project that is expected to cost $815 million. The building will be named the AbbVie Foundation Cancer Pavilion, and is slated to open in 2027.
The idea behind the facility is to give residents on the South Side, where many Black Chicagoans live, better access to cancer care, while also attracting patients from across the region and beyond.
Cancer death rates on the South Side are nearly twice the national average, and it’s the leading cause of death in the neighborhoods of Calumet Heights, East Side, Kenwood, South Deering and Woodlawn, according to UChicago Medicine. Black people are also underrepresented in clinical trials.
“This gift … allows us to be able to advance health equity and increase access to this high quality, culturally competent care,” said Dr. Kunle Odunsi, director of the UChicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center.
UChicago Medicine has been working with the AbbVie Foundation, which is a nonprofit organization that aims to advance health equity, for some time, and the donation came out of that relationship, Odunsi said.
“We’re really excited and proud to have the opportunity to support University of Chicago Medicine and the South Side community in this way,” said Claudia Carravetta, vice president corporate responsibility and global philanthropy for AbbVie, a North Chicago-based pharmaceutical company, and president of the AbbVie Foundation. “The opportunity to increase access to preventive and complex cancer care to patients in the South Side community, and more broadly, is something that we really are looking forward to.”
UChicago Medicine first announced the facility in 2022, and the project broke ground in September of last year on East 57th Street, between South Maryland and South Drexel avenues.
The cancer hospital will have 80 beds for patients who need to stay overnight, 90 consultation and exam rooms, an urgent care clinic for cancer patients, imaging equipment, dedicated space for clinical trials, empty space to accommodate future needs and it will house support services for patients and their families.
Hospital leaders hope patients will be able to get nearly all of their cancer care at the hospital, rather than having to go to multiple locations for tests and treatment. And it will allow researchers, scientists and doctors to more easily work together, Odunsi said.
“Having a place, a central hub where all of these folks can congregate and interact we think will also accelerate our ability to break new ground and be able to accelerate the pace of new discoveries,” he said.
Hospital leaders also expect that the cancer hospital will take some of the pressure off of the busy main hospital, by freeing up more beds there for patients with other needs.
The project was originally supposed to cost $633 million and include 128 beds for overnight patients, but UChicago Medicine said in 2023 that the cost had risen to $815 million, and the number of beds would be reduced, because of “hyperinflation” and design changes.
The $75 million donation is one of the largest gifts ever to UChicago Medicine. In 2017, the Duchossois family donated $100 million to UChicago Medicine to establish The Duchossois Family Institute to study how the immune system, microorganisms in the bodyand genetics can work together to keep people healthy.
In 2020, the AbbVie Foundation also committed $8 million over five years to UChicago Medicine to establish its Liaisons in Care program, which sends health workers into the community to help residents navigate health care and to help connect them to health resources and services.
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