Approval of a new hospital for UC Irvine was all but assured Wednesday when two regents committees unanimously approved a financing plan for the $365-million project, which campus officials hope will vault their medical school into the top ranks nationally.

The full 26-member Board of Regents, which oversees the 10-campus University of California system, is expected to give the final OK to the project in its meeting today. The vote is the last critical step needed before fund-raising and construction can begin.

"A lot of us have put our lives into this in the last three years," said Dr. Ralph Cygan, chief executive of UCI Medical Center. "It's the culmination of a lot of very hard work and very diligent planning. [Thursday] is going to be a very good day for the medical center, for UCI and for Orange County."

The new hospital has been important enough that UCI Chancellor Ralph Cicerone designated it the campus' top fund-raising target. UCI officials decided they had to raise $10 million in preliminary funding by this week's meeting to show support for the project.

Tom Mitchell, UCI's head fund-raiser, said the university met the goal. Among those who contributed are top administrators at the hospital and the university, along with physicians at the medical center. Cygan said he had made a "significant commitment" of his own but would not specify how much.

UCI must raise $50 million of the construction financing, making it the largest fund drive in campus history, Mitchell said, at a time when the slow economy has all nonprofits struggling for money. Other funding sources include $17 million from medical center reserves and $235 million in state bonds.

Cicerone has said UCI will launch a two- to three-year fund-raising campaign in late spring or early summer, with an announcement of large gifts and support from prominent people. He said the goal may reach $75 million to $100 million to add endowments for scholarships, fellowships and research funds.

Ted Smith, founder and retired chairman of FileNet Corp., and head of the UCI Foundation, the school's fund-raising arm, said current thinking is to aim for $50 million and hope to overshoot the target.

The seven-story hospital will be built next to the five-story building it will replace on the university's medical campus in Orange. The new building will have 221 beds, slightly more than the old one, and more than half of the medical center's total beds. The current hospital will be demolished once the new one is finished.

The project is expected to go to bid in early fall, and construction should begin in late winter or early spring, Cygan said. Completion is set for Jan. 1, 2008.

Hospitals throughout the state must meet seismic safety standards by that year. UCI officials decided that it would cheaper to build a new hospital than to fix the old one. It also provides a chance to replace what was once the county hospital, built in the early 1960s, with an academic medical center designed for teaching and research.

UCI officials expect it to boost the medical school's reputation and benefit the rest of the university as well.

"I think it will be a tremendous boost for us," Cygan said. "When you want to recruit other world-class doctors, you have to have first-class facilities, and this will give us state-of-the-art facilities so we can recruit on a national stage."

In Los Angeles, UCLA is receiving about $300 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to rebuild its Westwood hospital complex, which was damaged in the Northridge earthquake. Because UCI Medical Center came through the 1994 temblor unscathed, no federal money was available for meeting the new safety standards.

About 300 doctors on the UCI medical school's clinical faculty see patients at the medical center. About 600 community physicians have privileges there.

The medical center has made a turnaround in the past decade. The hospital has been in the black for at least eight years, after losing money about 15 years in a row, Cygan said. In the mid-1990s, the university considered selling the medical center.

This year, the hospital is on track to earn $30 million, slightly less than last year's record-setting $36 million, Cygan said.

To protect its bottom line, the medical center has been cutting back on its care for the poor in recent months, with those beds accommodating paying patients lured by advertisements highlighting the hospital's prestigious doctors and new equipment.

The fund-raising campaign comes at a time when a slow economy, stock market losses and government cutbacks have made it difficult for nearly all nonprofit groups to raise money. UCI officials have acknowledged that challenge.

"The climate is like nuclear winter out there," said Smith of the UCI Foundation.

Fund-raising experts, however, said it is easier to raise money for university hospitals than other charitable projects because funding medical research is viewed as more of a necessity.

"We're all hoping that the next three years will show better economic news," Cygan said.