Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center broke ground on October 19 on the Lavine Bekenstein Cancer Hospital, the 300-bed inpatient cancer facility the partners have been building toward since September 2023. The 450,000-square-foot hospital will span 10 floors, sit on the former Joslin Diabetes Center site in Boston’s Longwood area, and is expected to open in 2031 at an estimated cost of $1.68 billion, according to the Dana-Farber release cited by Becker’s Hospital Review. Site preparation began in April with the deconstruction of the former diabetes centre.
The hospital will be owned and operated by Dana-Farber and dedicated exclusively to inpatient cancer care, with Beth Israel Deaconess and Harvard Medical Faculty Physicians providing clinical support. It is financed in part by a joint philanthropic commitment from the Bekenstein and Lavine families that Dana-Farber calls the largest single gift in its history. The service model is already changing ahead of the building: as of October 19, outpatient breast oncology services moved to Dana-Farber while breast surgical services moved to Beth Israel Deaconess under Elizabeth Mittendorf, with other cancer areas to transition over several years.
The institutional meaning is the separation from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Dana-Farber’s longtime inpatient partner and part of Mass General Brigham, which has responded by launching its own rival cancer institute. The new hospital, to be the only cancer-focused inpatient facility in New England, concentrates Dana-Farber’s inpatient care in one purpose-built setting designed around oncology’s needs, flexible clinical space for advances in treatment, and integrated research, rather than beds scattered inside a general academic hospital.