Pitt approves $50M center to research arthritis, osteoporosis

University of Pittsburgh trustees on Thursday approved a $50 million center for musculoskeletal research, an ambitious science and treatment effort aided by tens of millions of dollars donated by the Greensburg founder of Hillandale Farms.

The board of trustees’ unanimous vote green-lights a renovation on the 16th floor of the Thomas E. Starzl Biomedical Science Tower on Pitt’s main Oakland campus.

The work will yield a hub for research and applied uses intended to better treat osteoporosis, degenerative arthritis and other painful conditions that afflict millions of Americans.

Orland Bethel, 88, and the family foundation that bears his name initially donated $25 million last year. Pitt matched it with another $25 million.

To ensure the center’s sustainability and its ability to make a distinguishable contribution to medicine, the family foundation added another $18.5 million this month to create a biological specimen repository within the Orland Bethel Family Musculoskeletal Research Center(BMRC).

This repository, or biobank, is believed to be the only orthopedic-­based biobank in the Western Hemisphere.

“On behalf of the board, I want to express my sincere gratitude to the Orland Bethel Family Foundation for this transformational gift,” Pitt trustees chair John Verbanac said moments after the vote. “This is quite an investment, and we can not express fully our appreciation to the family.”

Part of the tower’s 16th floor will undergo renovations through 2026, enabling the new center to move into its permanent home. The newly created venture has begun hiring staff and consolidating lab space in a temporary campus location.

Bethel, as a patient, knows Pitt as the place that gave him his mobility back. He was diagnosed with spinal stenosis in 2014 and lived with severe hip and lower back pain from narrowing and squeezing of the nerves and spinal cord.

After several surgeries to address spinal stenosis and scoliosis, Bethel has his mobility, even playing golf, he told TribLive.

Bethel was CEO of Gettysburg-based Hillandale Farms, a national egg supplier. Hillandale maintains a corporate office in Hempfield, a distribution center in Plum and operations across Pennsylvania, Ohio and Connecticut.

Also during Thursday’s board meeting, Chancellor Joan Gabel gave her annual report to the board, which met off campus in The Assembly, a recently opened hub for biomedical research at 5051 Centre Ave. Pitt and Wexford Science + Technology developed the eight-story site.

Gabel recounted progress toward the university’s five-year Plan for Pitt 2028. In doing so, she touched on efforts to reduce student debt, analyze and benchmark administrative costs, and sustain academic and financial momentum. She noted this year’s number of first-year applicants, 60,892, was a new record high, eclipsing the 58,415 applications last year.