CLEVELAND – The raising of the last structural beam atop the University Hospitals Cancer Hospital will take place during a “Topping Out” ceremony on Wednesday, May 7 at 1:15 p.m.   The placing of the final steel beam, along with a pine tree and American flag, on top of the Cancer Hospital is a symbolic tradition of good fortune in the construction of a new building and represents a major step forward for the 120-bed freestanding hospital and UH’s $229 million investment into cancer care.

Scheduled to open in May 2011, the UH Cancer Hospital will be located on the campus of UH Case Medical Center and will house all of the UH Ireland Cancer Center’s inpatient and outpatient services under one roof. Designed to optimize patient care, the 375,000-square-foot facility will triple the square footage that cancer services currently encompass in seven different locations at UH Case Medical Center.

CLEVELAND – University Hospitals Case Medical Center is currently enrolling patients in START, a Phase III clinical study assessing the efficacy and safety of BLP25 Liposome Vaccine (L-BLP25), an investigational therapeutic lung cancer vaccine designed to treat patients with unresectable, stage III non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). START (Stimulating Targeted Antigenic Responses To NSCLC) is designed to evaluate the survival duration of patients receiving the investigational therapeutic cancer vaccine for the treatment of unresectable stage III NSCLC whose tumors are stable or responding after chemo-radiation.

“New treatments are urgently needed for patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer,” said Balazs Halmos, M.D., Ireland Cancer Center of University Hospitals Case Medical Center and assistant professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. “Current standard of care typically provides only limited success, with fewer than 15 percent of patients surviving longer than five years. New drugs are essential to help increase survival rates for these patients.”