MRI image of brain showing area of Alzheimer patient. The University of South Carolina is seeking $150 million from the Legislature to build a neurological hospital estimated to cost $350 million. (File photo by Getty Images)
On any given day inside Shirley Ryan AbilityLab’s Brain Innovation Center in downtown Chicago, one may see a stroke patient learning to walk again with the help of a robot rebuilding muscle memory and propelling them along a treadmill.
In the next room, brain injury patients work with therapists to relearn daily skills, such as cooking in the center’s full-sized therapy kitchen.
Upstairs, patients participate in video game-like therapy supported by a robotic arm. Fitted with sensors that measure grip strength and arm movement, therapists use the machine to measure patient improvements.
And along the way, patients participate in medical research studies, such as being fitted with sensors that use electric currents to stimulate swallowing.
It’s this type of rehabilitation center the University of South Carolina hopes to recreate, though on a smaller scale, in the Palmetto State. The university would couple this with a specialized neurology and neurosurgery hospital designed to handle the state’s most severe stroke, dementia and brain injury cases.
“What we’re trying to do here is not about the university, it’s about the people of South Carolina,” USC President Michael Amiridis told the SC Daily Gazette. “Our rates of death, in terms of brain trauma and in terms of stroke, are amongst the worst in the country.”
Strokes, which occur when blood flow to the brain is disrupted, were the fifth-highest cause of death in South Carolina in 2022, when 3,100 people died of the blockage. That year, the state had the tenth-highest stroke death rate nationwide, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
To make the proposed $350 million academic hospital and rehab center happen, the university is seeking $150 million from the Legislature, which the House included in its budget plan for the coming fiscal year.
Senate budget writers will hear from USC about the proposal Wednesday.
The remainder would come from reserve funds currently held by the state’s Medicaid agency, according to USC spokesman Jeff Stensland.
University of South Carolina President Michael Amiridis pictured Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2025, during Carolina Day at the Statehouse. (Photo provided by the University of South Carolina)
Amiridis saw firsthand the benefits of such a project during his nearly seven years as chancellor of the University of Illinois Chicago.
The Windy City’s university medical school and teaching hospital had a century-long history of neurosurgery, boasting some of the country’s leading experts in the field.
While USC’s own medical school doesn’t have the same storied history, Amiridis sees potential to grow the college’s prestige by tapping into new technologies, including robotic surgery.
“A lot of the changes that we have seen in medicine, and especially in the neurosurgery area, has to do with equipment, has to do with technology,” Amiridis said.
Similar to how USC works with companies, such as Siemens, Yaskawa robotics and Nephron Pharmaceuticals, it would form working research partnerships with the businesses that produce this new medical equipment.
Amiridis also predicts, because of its narrow focus, the teaching hospital will be “a destination of choice for physicians or graduates of medical schools who want to be neurosurgeons or neurologists,” helping grow the pool of neurological doctors in the state.
The need for more neuro expertise became evident to Amiridis and other university leadership over the past two years as the school created a network of clinics across the state to diagnose Alzheimer’s and dementia patients and increase access to care. Also in the works is USC’s $30 million Brain Health Center, an outpatient treatment and research facility expected to open this fall.
Through that process, USC researchers learned, the national average wait time for patients to get an appointment with a neurologist is one month. In South Carolina, the wait is nine months.
“You think you have Alzheimer’s disease. You want to see a doctor, and they tell you, ‘Great, we will see you next year,’” Amiridis said. “You can imagine how people feel about it, and how much we are losing.”
The project also has the support of the Alzheimer’s Association South Carolina chapter.
“South Carolina has been deemed a neurology desert, ranking among five states with the most significant projected gap between the available neurology workforce and the health needs of people with Alzheimer’s and other dementias in 2025,” Ashton Houghton, the chapter’s executive director, said in a statement. “Institutional advancements within the Palmetto State, such as USC’s proposed neurological hospital, can play an important part in expanding access to neurological care.”
USC’s plans also go beyond the critical initial treatment needed to save a stroke victim’s life.
“What happens next is extremely important as well,” Amiridis said. “You survived, but then we have to deal with the quality of life. And that in many of these cases, the difficult cases, takes a lot of time in terms of rehabilitation.”
If built, the hospital and rehab center would be the first of its kind in the Southeast.
“It doesn’t exist in the state of South Carolina, a facility like this. And the result of this is that the people who have the ability, the financial ability, go out of state, which is not acceptable in my opinion,” Amiridis said. “Those who don’t, they cannot go out of state, they have a significantly more difficult life after the event that they had with the brain.”
Outside of Chicago, research-based hospitals and neurological rehab centers are located in major cities such as Phoenix, Seattle, Boston and Baltimore. Yale University is building one in New Haven, Connecticut.
USC’s plans call for 112 to 140 beds in a 250,000 to 300,000-square-foot facility to be built next to the university’s future, $300 million School of Medicine in downtown Columbia’s BullStreet District.
According to Amiridis, once built, the hospital and center would be financially self-supporting. Research would be reliant on federal funds from the National Institutes of Health, the leading source of medical research dollars in the country.
While the distribution of those funds has been called into question under proposed cuts by the Trump Administration, Amiridis said he is optimistic a compromise will be reached as the policy changes make their way through the court system.
USC expects to cut the ribbon on the medical school in summer 2027.
If the Legislature approves the funding, Amiridis said he would like to see the neurological hospital open a year later.
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