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About UNC Lineberger

The UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center is a cancer research and treatment center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Serving patients at the N.C. Basnight Cancer Hospital, UNC Lineberger is the only public National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center in the state of North Carolina.

About the N.C. Cancer Hospital

N.C. Cancer Hospital
The N.C. Cancer Hospital in Chapel Hill.

The N.C. Basnight Cancer Hospital is the flagship site for UNC Cancer Care and the clinical home of UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, where we are exerting an unprecedented effort to make strides against cancer and the suffering it causes is fueled by collaboration across the population, basic and clinical sciences.

Our research and clinical care leaders

UNC Lineberger members carry out research within one of our nine center scientific programs:

  • Breast Cancer Research
  • Cancer Cell Biology
  • Cancer Epidemiology
  • Cancer Genetics
  • Cancer Prevention and Control
  • Clinical Research
  • Global Oncology
  • Immunology
  • Molecular Therapeutics
  • Virology

Additionally, some members are physician-researchers, who are vital components of our patient care team.

In addition to patient care within our clinics, UNC Lineberger offers several hundred clinical trials for adults and children who have cancer or blood disorders.

The Comprehensive Cancer Support Program offers programs and services to patients and caregivers during treatment, recovery and survivorship.

Community Outreach and Engagement at UNC Lineberger

Caption available
The UNC Lineberger Community Outreach and Engagement team with members of the community board.

The Office of Community Outreach and Engagement ensures that UNC Lineberger research, clinical care, and programmatic efforts are timely, relevant, responsive, and infused with community perspectives, including those perspectives of policy makers, community providers and public health practitioners, cancer patients and caregivers, and the public at large. The COE office plays an important role by helping UNC Lineberger reduce disparities and improve cancer outcomes for the people of North Carolina.

Highlighted programs and initiatives

The Carolina Endometrial Cancer Study

UNC Lineberger researchers are launching a major initiative to track 1,000 women across North Carolina with endometrial cancer to understand why the cancer is increasing in incidence and mortality, and why the disease is more deadly for some women than others.

In the Carolina Endometrial Cancer Study, researchers will investigate factors contributing to these statistics, including patients’ medical history or lifestyle. They will also evaluate the genetics of patients’ tumors in order to potentially identify therapeutic strategies.

Not only do researchers want to understand why the disease is becoming more prevalent and mortality rates have increased, but also why mortality rates are higher in black women compared with white women.

An employee of the ACT Facility wears full protective medical gear, and holds up a sealed tube of light red liquid.
An employee at the Advanced Cellular Therapeutics Facility holds a tube of human cells. The ACT Facility was established in 2015 to support clinical trials requiring human cellular therapy products at UNC Lineberger.

CAR-T immunotherapy

UNC Lineberger is one of a select few academic centers in the United States — and the only center in North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia — with the scientific, technical and clinical capabilities to identify new tumor targets and then develop and infuse novel CAR-T immunotherapy.

These investigational therapies are manufactured at UNC Lineberger and are not commercially available; they are part of CAR-T clinical trials that are only available at UNC Lineberger.

Malawi Cancer Consortium

The UNC-Malawi Cancer Consortium is funded through a multi-investigator cooperate grant (U54 CA190152) between UNC Lineberger and Lighthouse Trust, the Malawi Ministry of Health, and University of Malawi College of Medicine.

The UNC-Malawi Cancer Consortium seeks to:

  1. Contribute to an accurate accounting of all all cancer incidences in Malawi. Malawi is one of only a handful of countries in Africa that contribute data to the WHO/IARC world-wide cancer registries.
  2. Understand lymphomas (pediatric and adult) in Malawi and to develop new treatments for this devastating disease.
  3. Understand Kaposi Sarcoma (pediatric and adult) in people living with HIV/AIDS in Malawi and to develop new treatments for this devastating disease.