Leaders of Baltimore’s west-side biotechnology park are plotting a $30 million three-story hotel that will be built on top of a planned proton cancer treatment center slated to open by 2014.

The University of Maryland, Baltimore BioPark was expected to pitch to city officials March 31 its plans for the project, which would be the only hotel in its neighborhood.

The proposed 130-room hotel would accommodate patients at the planned Maryland Proton Treatment Center, an advanced radiation technology cancer treatment facility that will be the first medical facility of its kind in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C., region.

The six-story combined cancer center and hotel will be built immediately west of the BioPark’s Building 1 and will have a total of 195,000 square feet, running from West Baltimore Street to West Fayette Street. The university said it does not have an operator for the hotel yet.

University of Maryland has been mulling plans for a hotel in that neighborhood for several years, but the existing BioPark buildings have not made an attractive selling point for one.

But proton therapy requires daily treatments for up to a month at a time, so patients coming to Baltimore will have a convenient place to stay with a hotel right on top of the cancer center, said Jim Hughes, University of Maryland's vice president for research and development.

Jeffrey Bordok, CEO of Nevada-based Advanced Particle Therapy LLC, which is raising money for the project, said 70 percent of patients that use proton centers travel 100 or more miles for their treatments. Out of the nine other similar proton cancer treatment centers in the U.S., many of them have hotels connected or located near the facilities, Bordok said.

“These patients need someplace to stay, someplace that’s affordable. There’s definitely a need there,” he said.

Advanced Particle Therapy has selected the Haskell Co. of Jacksonville, Fla., as the building’s contractor.

University of Maryland and Advanced Particle Therapy are working together on the project but plans for the hotel are not final yet. The university must seek approval from the city’s planning department and the state. Once that happens, construction on the project could begin as early as August.

Hughes, also the president of University of Maryland's Health Sciences Research Park Corp., said the hotel could lure new retail and restaurants in the area, too.

“This will help to expand the day here around the BioPark,” Hughes said.

The BioPark neighborhood is active during business hours, but a hotel and new retail stores could mean more foot traffic through the area at night, Hughes said.

The $200 million cancer center, announced in October by the University of Maryland School of Medicine, is expected to create 325 new construction jobs and 110 permanent jobs including radiation oncologists, medical physicists, radiation technologists and other medical and administrative jobs.

The new hotel will boost that number of temporary and permanent jobs. University of Maryland did not project how many jobs the hotel would create.

Once completed, the center will be able to serve 2,000 patients annually.