Uganda Cancer Institute (UCI) is a public, specialized, tertiary care medical facility owned by the Uganda Ministry of Health. Located in the Ugandan capital Kampala, the institute is designated as East Africa's Centre of Excellence in Oncology. In collaboration with Makerere University College of Health Sciences, UCI plans to start offering master's degrees, doctoral programs and post-doctoral fellowships in oncology care.
Location The facility is located along Upper Mulago Hill Road, on Mulago Hill, in the Kawempe Division of Kampala, about 4.5 kilometres (2.8 mi) north of the central business district of the city.
Overview UCI is a cancer treatment, research, and teaching center, affiliated with the Makerere University School of Medicine and with the Mulago National Referral Hospital, the teaching hospital for the medical school. UCI maintains an inpatient facility with a capacity of 80 beds. It attends to an average of about 200 patients daily. In October 2011, ground was broken for a three-story, integrated cancer training, research, and treatment facility, measuring nearly 16,700 square feet (1,550 m2). The new building, called the "UCI-Fred Hutch Cancer Centre," is jointly operated by the UCI and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, Washington, US as part of the UCI-Fred Hutch Collaboration. In May 2015, the completed facility opened and began attending to patients. In November 2020, the UCI-Fred Hutch Collaboration completed the construction of the new ground-level of the facility, which houses administrative offices and a biorepository.
Cancer burden As of August 2024, it was reported that over a 5-year period, an average of 35,968 new cancer cases were diagnosed in Uganda every year. Also every year, on average, 24,629 people died from their cancer diagnoses. Another 77,028 patients, on average, live with their cancers in the country. Between 1 January 2017 and 31 December 2022, the leading cancers in women in Uganda were (1) Cervical cancer (2) Breast cancer (3) Stomach cancer (4) Esophageal cancer and (5) Liver cancer. During the same time, the leading cancers in men in Uganda were (1) Prostate cancer (2) Kaposi's sarcoma (3) Liver cancer and (4) Lymphoma.
History UCI was founded in 1967 with twenty beds, as the Lymphoma Treatment Center, to treat childhood lymphomas, predominantly Burkitt's lymphoma, the most common childhood lymphoma in Uganda and endemic to tropical Africa. In 1969, UCI expanded to a total of 40 beds, when the Solid Tumor Center was added to focus research on Kaposi's sarcoma and liver cancer. "During the 1960s and early 1970s, UCI was a leading international medical research center, in its areas of specialization. UCI established collaboration with the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in Bethesda, Maryland." In 1972, following the expulsion of Ugandan Asians by dictator Idi Amin, nearly all of NCI's scientists left. Professor Charles Olweny, a Uganda researcher, interrupted his studies at NCI in the US and returned to become the first Ugandan director of UCI. In 1982, following the overthrow of Idi Amin, Olweny was forced to leave Uganda for security reasons, leaving leadership of UCI in the hands of Professor Edward Katongole-Mbidde. When Katongole-Mbidde left UCI to become the director at the Uganda Virus Research Institute in 1995, Dr. Jackson Orem took over the helm at UCI. Between 2011 and 2015, the bed capacity at the institute was increased to 80. As of September 2023, UCI's bed capacity was reported to be 100 in-patient beds, of which 75 are general and 25 are for private, paying patients. At that time, a new 360-bed inpatient facility was under construction to accommodate an increased influx of patients. Since the beginning of 2023, there has been a significant increase in private patients, who previously were seeking cancer care outside the country. The patient influx is attributed to better services and care, including the availability of oncology medications, the availability of a medical LINAC machine to precisely guide radiation therapy and an increased number of oncology physicians and nurses.
International collaboration The international research centers with collaborative projects with Uganda Cancer Institute include, but are not limited to the following:
National Cancer Institute – Bethesda, Maryland, US Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center – Seattle, Washington, US Case Western Reserve University – Cleveland, Ohio, US
Uganda Program on Cancer and Infectious Diseases The Uganda Program on Cancer and Infectious Diseases (UPCID), established in 2004, is a joint program between Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle and the Uganda Cancer Institute. The program works to understand and treat infection-related cancers in the United States and abroad. The collaboration was founded by Corey Casper, a physician-scientist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and Jackson Orem, director of the Uganda Cancer Institute. It received additional funding in October 2009, when the United States Agency for International Development awarded a US$500,000 grant to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center to aid in the construction of the first United States cancer clinic and medical-training facility in Africa.
Brachytherapy In 2016, the institute installed a "Flexitron Cobalt-60 High Dose Rate" brachytherapy system from Elekta. The system is part of a two-year renovation plan that UCI is implementing at a cost of US$49 million.
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