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Foundations to Fund Moonshot R&D Initiatives at Universities in CA, IN, NY, PA, TX

June 02, 2016

As the 2015-2016 academic calendar comes to an end, several universities announced large financial contributions from foundations to address large societal issues including cancer and a variety of neurological disorders.  These large-scale initiatives will be undertaken at universities in California, Indiana, New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas. The Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI) also announced the launch of its SPARK program, an online research initiative designed to become the largest autism study ever undertaken in the United States.

In May, the Weill Family Foundation announced a $185 million donation to the University of California-San Francisco (UCSF) to establish the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences – a 270,000-square-foot facility located at the UCSF's Mission Bay campus that will house a brain and nervous system disorders clinic as well as state-of-the-art research laboratories. The gift also will establish the UCSF Weill Innovation Fund to support high-risk, high-reward neuroscience research projects and support for graduate students and young investigators in the neurosciences.  The goal of the initiative is to perform cutting-edge research that will lead to new treatments for neurological and psychiatric illnesses. In the last year, UCSF has raised over $500 million for its neuroscience research efforts including the Weill Family Foundation donation. Read the announcement…

In April, the Parker Foundation launched the $250 million Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy – a network of six cancer research centers from across the U.S. that aims to accelerate the development of breakthrough immune therapies. The six research centers will bring together over 40 laboratories and more than 300 researchers to focus R&D efforts to harness the body's immune system to fight cancer cells. The six research centers that comprise the network include:   

  • New York's Memorial Sloan Kettering;
  • Stanford Medicine;
  • The University of California-Los Angeles;
  • The University of California-San Francisco;
  • The University of Texas’ MD Anderson Cancer Center; and,
  • The University of Pennsylvania.

Sean Parker, the co-founder of music-sharing website Napster and the first president of Facebook, believes that the network will allow breakthroughs to be shared by centers within the network “without any kind of IP (intellectual property) entanglements or bureaucracy.”

In partnership with the University of Notre Dame, the Ara Parseghian Medical Research Foundation will establish the $45 million Ara Parseghian Medical Research Fund to find a cure or treatment for Niemann-Pick Type C (NPC) disease – a rare, fatal neurodegenerative disease. In addition to being available to Notre Dame faculty, the fund will support a competitive grants process for researchers from across the country to support NPC research, raise awareness for the disease, manage communications, and oversee an annual research conference in which researchers from around the world collaboratively share their findings. Notre Dame also recently established the Warren Family Research Center for Drug Discovery and Development, a resource for the worldwide NPC research community that can assist in the design and synthesis of drug candidates. 

In an attempt to establish the largest autism study ever undertaken in the United States, the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI) unveiled its SPARK program to collect information and DNA for genetic analysis from 50,000 individuals with autism and their families to advance our understanding of the condition’s causes and accelerate the development of new treatments and supports. In addition to its data collection efforts, the SPARK program also will coordinate research efforts at 21 university-affiliated clinical sites. SFARI also intends to provide all researchers with access to the SPARK genomic, medical and behavioral data. The goal of the SFARI-funded program is to build a research community that will advance the understanding of autism and provide meaningful information and resources to participants. 

foundations, r&d, higher ed