By Fox23.com News Staff
TULSA, Okla. — The Oklahoma Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust (TSET) has announced that it has awarded the University of Oklahoma a $25 million grant to build a new OU Health Stephenson Cancer Center facility in Tulsa. The project will house the TSET Clinical Research Center.
The TSET Legacy Grant, will help build out a floor dedicated to clinical trials, including an investigational drug pharmacy for cataloguing and storing new experimental drugs and a pharmacokinetics lab, which studies how a drug the body and how it is processed over time.
Stephenson Cancer Center currently offers about 300 clinical trials, which gives patients access to new drugs up to five years before wide availability.
“For nearly 20 years, TSET has worked with OU Health Stephenson Cancer Center to reduce the burden of cancer, and this is another great example of their commitment to helping the people of Oklahoma,” said Robert Mannel, M.D., director of the cancer center and professor in the OU College of Medicine.
The Tulsa Stephenson Cancer Center also plans to offer new cancer therapies including theranostics, a precision medicine technique that uses targeted radioactive compounds to both detect and treat disease, and CAR T-cell therapy, which re-engineers a patient’s own immune cells to attack cancer more effectively.
The new building is expected to open in 2028 and will be approximately 176,000 square feet and cost $189 million to construct. It will be located at the OU Schusterman Campus, located on 41st and Yale.
