On Feb. 19, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Texas Children’s Hospital, both based in Houston, launched a joint venture with one mission: to end childhood cancer.
While specifics had not been established at the time of the announcement, the organizations said collaboration on operations and patient care would begin in early 2026.
Three months after the initial announcement, MD Anderson and Texas Children’s shared news of a $150 million gift from the Kinder Foundation, which would fuel the establishment of the Kinder Children’s Cancer Center.
Upon the joint venture’s initial start in 2026, pediatric oncology care will be housed at Texas Children’s while radiation oncology will remain at MD Anderson. Both organizations will continue to provide adolescent and young adult care as well.
The yet-to-be-built Kinder Children’s Cancer Center facility, poised to become the nation’s largest pediatric cancer center, will offer inpatient and ambulatory care alongside research labs dedicated to drug discovery and clinical trials. The new center will be connected via sky bridge to Texas Children’s Hospital.
Two leaders from both organizations, William Parsons, MD, PhD, and Richard Gorlick, MD, spoke to Becker’s about the new venture, the logistics behind the decision to partner and their hope for the future of pediatric cancer care.
Dr. Parsons is the director of the Center for Precision Oncology, interim director and research director of the Cancer and Hematology Center, and co-director of the Cancer Genetics and Genomics program at Texas Children’s. Dr. Gorlick is division head of pediatrics, department chair for pediatric patient care and director of the Pediatric Sarcoma Research Laboratory department at MD Anderson.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: How did the collaboration between MD Anderson and Texas Children’s come together? What have been the key drivers behind the partnership?
Dr. William Parsons: Number one, an understanding that it’s the right thing to do for patients and families.
From a healthcare system or implementation perspective, having two excellent institutions both caring for children with cancer — the disease that kills more children than any other in the U.S. — literally across the street from one another, doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s not an optimal strategy.
The nature of these diseases, conducting large clinical trials or doing research studies, requires collaboration. For us, it’s very natural to be working with folks across the country and across the world, so working with someone across the street is not such a conceptual challenge.
We have collaborated across the street with each other on any number of things. We already have patients who go back and forth, who go to a trial at one place or are cared for from the other place.
Dr. Richard Gorlick: Dr. Peter Pisters [President of MD Anderson] has told the story many times where, just given our physical proximity we are able to see Texas Children’s from the operating room suites, he recognized that there had to be a way to synergize the two organizations. I think that recognition started coming to a greater reality through conversation with Mark Wallace [former CEO of Texas Children’s].
One challenge of doing this is the fact that our academic homes are different, Baylor College of Medicine and University of Texas. We needed both sides in order to make this happen, and the vision of combining the two programs was compelling enough that they decided to take on the task.
It makes a lot of sense that the two programs are synergistic. Through the joint venture, we can create efficiencies by not having duplication, by having a large breadth of patients when conducting clinical trials and having additional expertise in different clinical areas.
Q: What are the specific gaps or unmet needs in pediatric oncology that the new Kinder Children’s Cancer Center is uniquely positioned to address?
WP: You can broadly categorize it into two things. Number one is development and evaluation of innovative new therapies for hard-to-treat cancers.
For all the progress that’s been made in pediatric oncology, where we expect more than 80% of our patients to be cured and where some diseases that 50 even 20 years ago would have been uniformly fatal are now treatable diseases, we have narrowed it down to a core set of patients with particular sets of diseases that are high risk and don’t do well enough with in terms of treatments.
From basic science research to translational laboratory research to running clinical trials, the opportunity to have synergy of both strategy and resources around those patients, with the goal of improving care for all these patients and truly ending cancer for children is always going to be one area of focus.
The flip side of that coin is we are curing more patients than ever, which is amazing. There are now hundreds of thousands of survivors of pediatric cancer in the U.S., probably inching closer towards a million, and we have an equal obligation to take optimal care of those patients. So survivorship programs and research to both develop less toxic and safer therapies is going to be a key, but also managing and optimizing care of those patients across their lives, not just when they’re children. Together we can be strategic about how to make that happen.
Q: How will the colocation of research labs and clinical care within the new facility accelerate scientific discovery?
RG: The nature of science is that even with a single problem, everybody sort of takes a unique approach to trying to tackle the problem.
When you talk about cell therapy, it comes in a lot of flavors. Some people are manipulating a type of immune cell called the T cell, but others are manipulating cells that are called NK cells. At first glance, it’s sort of a similar category and there’s still overlap in how those are done, but there’s more differences than similarities. Our synergy is a recognition that even though there may be some degree of duplication in terms of broad research topics, there are actually different ways to get there.
If we recognize the mission of this venture is to end childhood cancer, doing things one at a time, or one approach at a time, is not going to get us to that mission realization very quickly. Having the scale to parallel process multiple approaches toward one problem at the same time is more likely to achieve success.
WP: Another point to emphasize is the complementary aspect of physical co-localization.
When clinicians can work directly with researchers, they can inform each other. They can talk about strategy, identify the most important questions and work together. Richard and I work together all the time and we see each other in person once in a while. Doing that a bit more would surely be more effective in terms of making sure we’re aligned and really dreaming big about how we can make the maximum impact for our patients.
Q: Looking ahead to the 2026 launch, what outcomes or metrics will you use to define early success for the Kinder Children’s Cancer Center?
WP: The initial early benchmark will be managing this transition to the joint venture for our patients and their families, making sure their clinical care is seamless, that there aren’t any disruption or changes. Our patients and their families develop incredibly close relationships with their physicians, nurses, their child life folks, the staff, their palliative care team — everyone who takes care of them.
At the moment, we’re spending a lot of time starting to think and optimize how to make this transition for the patients seamless. So that they don’t wonder if they’re being taken care of by MD Anderson doctor, or Texas Children’s doctor, but rather, know they are being taken care of by the world’s best team of doctors, nurses and staff. Also making sure in terms of the clinical trials for those patients, that the transition is seamless as well. Those are going to be our number one through number 10 obligations and areas of focus, in parallel with other items as well.
RG: When you’re looking at metrics, some of it you want to quantitate. Some of the things we’re going to watch very closely are related to patient satisfaction and safety, so that patients are not disrupted by the transition and that they are protected.
Another one of the things we’re really going to watch is our accrual of patients on clinical trials. I think one plus one should be three, and that the number of patients that we put on clinical trials each year — specifically therapeutic clinical trials — should go up considerably.
Finally, while you never know exactly what goes into national benchmarks, we do think this program should achieve a certain level of national recognition.
Q: In what ways do you envision the center setting a new national or even global standard for pediatric oncology care?
WP: The amazingly generous donation from the Kinder family and the Kinder Foundation has enabled us to practically speak and think about this new facility and kick off this joint venture. Beyond the practical aspects, the operational and strategic synergies that we’ve been talking about, we’re also hoping to make a splash here.
We’d like to bring new attention to the program, to the medical centers and to Houston. We want this to be the place that you look to if you’re the parent of a child with a hard-to-treat cancer, a complicated cancer or blood disorder — one that potentially would benefit from a clinical trial or a really amazing team of experts in that particular disease.
We’re hoping to add even more of a national, international focus on pediatric cancer, hematology research and clinical care, we’re always on our stumps, trying to advocate to whomever will talk to us about it.
RG: We want to be the number one center for pediatric cancer, that is the goal.
By partnering two outstanding programs together, alongside our academic homes, we’re going to be better together. We’re going to preserve the best of both and incorporate it into this new entity.
This venture is unique, it’s hard to sort of say in one word how it’s unique, but it’s unique. And we are immensely grateful to the Kinder family for supporting and being the driving factor behind the facility.
