Dana-Farber aiming for $1b to boost care

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute will announce the largest hospital fund-raising campaign in New England history today, hoping to raise $1 billion to turn the rapidly growing scientific understanding of cancer into better treatments for cancer patients.

The money will also create a more patient-friendly medical center, including a 13-floor tower that will greatly expand the number of patients who can be treated on Dana-Farber's cramped 3.3-acre campus.

The campaign is occurring at a time when important breakthroughs such as the Human Genome Project and targeted cancer drugs are raising hope that medicine may finally be getting the upper hand against the nation's second-leading killer. For the second year in a row, fewer people died from cancer in 2004 than the year before.

"For the first time in human history, we know what causes cancer," said Dr. Barrett J. Rollins , chief scientific officer at Dana-Farber, who helped present the fund-raising plan to Dana-Farber's board of directors yesterday. "We know it's a genetic disease. . . . Cancer is hundreds and hundreds of diseases, each with its own genetic changes. We see the path before us pretty clearly with a boat load of work to do."

Dana-Farber officials say they already have quietly obtained commitments for more than half of the goal. The cancer care center -- to be constructed on a newly cleared lot within the existing campus in the Longwood medical area -- will have 100 exam rooms, 140 chemotherapy rooms, and other services for an outpatient population that is expected to double from 184,000 patient visits in 2005 to more than 400,000 by 2016.

Construction will take only about $150 million of the $1 billion; the rest is expected to go toward research, equipment, and direct patient care both at the hospital's main campus and at satellite clinics.

Hospitals and medical schools across the country are launching increasingly ambitious fund-raising efforts in part to offset cutbacks in federal funding and tighter insurance reimbursements. Dartmouth Medical School and Dartmouth - Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire are in the midst of a $250 million campaign for a children's hospital and cancer clinic among other projects. Yale University in Connecticut is raising money for a $430 million cancer center in collaboration with Yale-New Haven Hospital.

"It's a good economy" for philanthropy, said Neil Steinberg , vice president for development at Brown University in Rhode Island, which is raising up to $475 million to expand its medical school and biomedical research as part of a $1.4 billion campaign for the university. Nationally, charitable donations doubled from 1995 to 2005, reaching $260 billion, according to Indiana University's Center on Philanthropy, and the upward trend is expected to continue as baby boomers die and leave bequests to the next generation.

However, few US hospitals have tried to raise so much money at once, and Eugene R. Tempel , the philanthropy center's executive director, cautioned that Dana-Farber has its work cut out for it. He said that the biggest donations usually come at the beginning of a campaign.

No hospital in New England has been more successful in fund-raising in recent years than Dana-Farber, which led Boston's eight major teaching hospitals in gifts last year with $203 million, all of which will go toward the campaign. In all, Dana-Farber officials have lined up $544 million in commitments toward the $1 billion goal in private meetings with longtime supporters over the past three years. The gifts include a previously announced $50 million from Richard A. and Susan F. Smith -- whose family has supported the hospital for 60 years -- and $16.5 million from Jack and Shelley Blais , the Framingham couple that bought the right to name the New England Patriots' practice facility the "Dana-Farber Field House."

Now, after the three-year "quiet period" to test the appeal of Dana-Farber's marketing strategy, hospital staff and board members will host fund-raising events from Boston to Washington, D.C., to Palm Beach, Fla., in hopes of raising the remaining $466 million by Sept. 30, 2010. The hospital's development staff said it will be a stretch.

"This is not an unambitious undertaking, and we know that, but it's for the absolute best of reasons," Larry Lucchino, chief executive of the Boston Red Sox, said in an interview.

He said he felt as though he was taking on "a second job" when he agreed to co chair the campaign along with Josh Bekenstein , managing director of Bain Capital, LLC. Some staff and board members contend that $1 billion is too much to ask for, but Lucchino said the hospital's estimate of what it needs to sustain growth in patients and research is nearly $1 billion, so they succumbed to "the tyranny of round numbers" and agreed to a 10-digit goal.

Dr. Edward J. Benz Jr. , the Dana-Farber chief executive who initiated the fund-raising campaign, said he's confident donors will be convinced that the $1 billion effort, dubbed "Mission Possible" by the hospital, is a good investment. However, he said, "When the actual number came in, I gulped."

Lucchino, a Dana-Farber supporter since he was treated there for non-Hodgkins lymphoma in 1985, brings a key asset with him -- the Red Sox. The team is a longtime supporter of the hospital's Jimmy Fund.

The fund-raising climate may be particularly good for cancer research: Officials at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, the nation's largest private cancer center, recently doubled a $1 billion fund-raising goal set in 2003 as donations raced past $1.5 billion.

Cancer researchers believe this is a time of extraordinary promise in their field as the emergence of powerful new tools for genetic and molecular analysis allow them to target specific cancers with greater precision and fewer toxic side effects than conventional chemotherapy and radiation treatment.

Dana-Farber researchers led the studies into one of the first "smart drugs," Gleevec, which works against a rare blood cancer by targeting a key protein.

Today, the hospital is hosting 658 clinical trials of cancer treatments, a 60 percent increase in just five years that reflects a national explosion in cancer research.

But the slightly lower death toll from cancer reported by the American Cancer Society last month will nevertheless result in an estimated 559,650 US cancer deaths this year, a number that the group forecasts could still rise in the years ahead as the baby boom generation ages. Meanwhile, the National Institutes of Health budget for biomedical research went down last year for the first time since the 1960s.

"We are so close," said Rollins. "To suddenly see the funds drying up is so frustrating."

Scott Allen can be reached at allen@globe.com.