Tycoon helps set up £110m US-style cancer care centre

THOUSANDS of patients are set to benefit from Britain's first American-style cancer centre.

The £110 million outpatient unit will be built by University College London Hospitals NHS trust and will provide specialist drug treatment. Each floor will be dedicated to a different type of the disease.

Staff will have close links with the UCL Cancer Institute, putting patients at the front of the queue for new therapies.

Plans for the centre were approved this week by the trust board and it is expected to open in 2012. NHS chiefs have been working on the building's design with multi-millionaire Christopher Moran.

The former Lloyds and stockmarket broker is best known for his painstaking restoration of Crosby Hall in Chelsea.

Mr Moran, 60, told the Evening Standard the centre would "raise the bar" for cancer care: "We've studied the best of America's daycare centres and we're creating a facility that will be without parallel in the UK in terms of tumour-specific treatment, research and clinical trials." Survival rates for the disease have improved, but more people are developing it because they are living longer.

The centre will be modelled on institutions such as New York's Sloan-Kettering hospital. University College Hospital chief executive Sir Robert Naylor said: "We plan a centre where each floor is designed around the needs of patients with different cancers."

Built on the site of the former Elizabeth Garrett Anderson maternity hospital, it will initially deal with up to 85,000 appointments a year and 14 types of cancer. Half the funding will be from UCLH and half from charity. Macmillan Cancer Support and Teenage Cancer Trust have pledged support and Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger has said his club will make the new centre its chosen charity.

Milos Maguire of Wimbledon, who has a rare tumour, is already getting the kind of treatment the centre will cater for. Doctors at UCLH gave the 20-year-old a special knapsack that enables him to administer some of his own drugs via a pump. He stays in a hotel nearby. "I prefer this to being in a hospital bed," he said. "You feel more in control when you are responsible for some of your medication."