Cincinnati Children’s Cancer and Blood Diseases Institute is staffed by 109 MD, MD/PhD and PhD faculty across 92 inpatient beds, a 35-bed clinic and a 13-bed infusion center. The hospital was ranked No. 1 in the nation for cancer among honor roll hospitals by U.S. News & World Report for 2025-26. It is also the first institute in the world advancing ultra-high dose rate “FLASH” proton therapy through its “FAST-01” and “FAST-02” clinical trials, and in late 2025 it opened a 55,000-square-foot Applied Gene and Cell Therapy Center to develop and manufacture CAR T-cell and gene-editing therapies in-house. Basic and translational research from the institute led directly to the FDA’s 2020 approval of Selumetinib for neurofibromatosis and its 2021 pediatric approval of Vyxeos for relapsed acute myeloid leukemia, and its virus-specific T-cell therapy program has infused more than 600 patients over 1,200 times. The institute received 60 grants from the National Institutes of Health in fiscal year 2026 and recently launched its Advanced Leukemia Therapies and Research Center alongside the Engraft Learning Health Network, an 18-program national collaborative performing roughly 2,000 transplants annually that won $1.48 million in Ohio state funding in 2025. Targeted quality initiatives over the past year cut inpatient central line-associated bloodstream infections by 72%, from 2.23 to 0.63 per 1,000 line days, and reduced rate-related medication errors by 28%. The institute has completed more than 2,400 pediatric bone marrow transplants in its history and operates one of the nation’s oldest and largest survivorship programs for pediatric cancer patients.
