Philanthropists Joan and Sandy Weill
Walter Zarnowitz/UCSF
Cancer researchers at Stanford University and UC San Francisco–now linked through the newly created Weill Cancer Hub West–will engineer immune cells, study weight loss drugs and more.
Sanford “Sandy” Weill, the former CEO and chairman of banking giant Citigroup, and his wife Joan have been big donors to medical research on both coasts of the U.S. Now, the couple are taking it up a notch. On Wednesday, two Bay Area universities–University of California, San Francisco and Stanford University–announced a $100 million gift over 10 years from the Weill Family Foundation for a new cancer hub that is designed to advance cancer research and treatment via four specific projects.
The gift, a matching grant, has the goal of raising an additional $100 million for the new initiative, called the Weill Cancer Hub West. A quarter of the matching funds have already been raised, the universities said.
“I think the time for cancer is now,” Sam Hawgood, UC San Francisco’s chancellor, tells Forbes. Hawgood cites advances in technology and cancer research including advanced computation and the ability to sequence the genomes of single cells at scale. “Those kinds of tools open up a whole new opportunity space–and the space is almost too big for any single university.”
Though the death rate from cancer has fallen by about a third in the past quarter century–partly due these better tools, cancer is still on the rise, with almost 20 million new cases annually and about 10 million deaths globally each year.
Sandy Weill, who retired as Citigroup CEO in 2003 and as chairman in 2006 and dropped off Forbes’ billionaires list in 2022 as a result of his charitable giving, is now age 92 and devoting most of his time to philanthropy via he and Joan’s $425 million (assets) charitable foundation. He’s a big fan of collaborative research. “When people are willing to partner and collaborate with other bright people, you get a much better chance of coming to a solution,” Weill said in an interview at his home in Sonoma, California last week.
The Weill Cancer Hub West will harness recent promising developments to tackle cancer. One project will use the gene editing tool CRISPR to engineer immune cells inside the body by injecting the CRISPR machinery into a patient, deliver it to a patient’s immune cells, and reprogram those cells to go after the cancer. Jennifer Doudna, the UC Berkeley biochemist who shared the Nobel prize in chemistry 2020 for the CRISPR gene editing breakthrough, will participate in this research effort as well.
Another project, in the area of cellular therapy, aims to build weaponized cells that are personalized to each patient to go after solid tumors–like breast cancer or pancreatic cancer. To date, this kind of cellular therapy has shown results in liquid tumors that circulate in the blood stream, in cancers like leukemia and lymphoma, but not yet in solid tumors. “We haven’t begun to scratch the surface of how we engineer cells” for this kind of treatment, says Dr. Crystal Mackall, the founding director of Stanford’s Center for Cancer Cell Therapy. Mackall will co-lead this project with UCSF immunology and microbiology professor Kole Roybal.
A third project will investigate the links between cancer, diet and drugs–including the very popular weight loss drugs called GLP-1 agonists (like Ozempic and Wegovy). Anecdotal information has shown a reduction in cancer by those taking the weight loss drugs, possibly because of reduced inflammation, says Alan Ashworth, president of UCSF’s cancer care center. The group will also study whether different diets, like a ketogenic diet, can slow cancer progression.
The fourth project will harness AI to examine anonymized patient medical records, imaging data, genetic tests and more to try and help determine the best treatments for an individual patient. This will be particularly helpful for guiding treatment, for example, for the third or fourth set of drugs (also called third- or fourth-line treament)–for patients with colorectal cancer, where there is no established standard, says Ashworth.
Stanford physician and immunologist Crystal Mackall is co-leading the team creating cellular therapies designed to go after solid tumors, which account for more than 90% of all cancers.
Stanford University Health Care
“We’re embracing risk in this. Now these projects are not going to fail in the sense they’re not going to discover things. But what we’ve got are stretch goals,” adds Ashworth.
The planning for how the Weill’s gift would be used has been in the works for two years. In December 2023, researchers from the two universities held a symposium to talk about what might be possible. “We came away thinking this is going to be really transformative,” says Lloyd Minor, dean of Stanford’s medical school and vice president for medical affairs at Stanford. Faculty members had the opportunity to submit a research proposal, and the projects were selected in an open competition. Minor expects to begin seeing the fruits of the research–improvements in cancer diagnosis, treatment and prevention–in a matter of years. “What we’ve witnessed over the past 15 years is a dramatic acceleration in the translation of science from the bench to improvements in therapies for patients,” says Minor, noting the rapid development of immunotherapy drugs called checkpoint inhibitors—that block a protein cancer uses to evade the immune system. The best known of these is a Merck’s drug Keytruda.
The Weills are betting that the collaborative work will yield results. Back in 2019, the couple launched the Weill Neurohub with a promise of $106 million in funding for collaborative neuroscience research by scientists at UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, the University of Washington and the Allen Institute in Seattle, founded by the late Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. In March this year, the Weills promised $50 million in funding to the newly-created Weill Cancer Hub East, a collaborative undertaking between Cornell University’s Weill Cornell Medicine, Princeton University, Rockefeller University and the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research.
A number of billionaire donors have also embraced collaborative research, including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, who launched their first Chan Zuckerberg Biohub in San Francisco in 2016 with a promised $600 million in funding. The biohub links researchers and engineers from UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco and Stanford; the couple have since launched additional biohubs in Chicago and New York. Sean Parker, who built a fortune as the (brief) first president of Facebook, launched the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy in 2016 with $250 million in seed funding; its research network includes seven universities or research centers including Stanford, UC San Francisco, and Weill Cornell Medicine.
Google founder Sergey Brin has put more than $1.75 billion toward research of Parkinson’s disease; his Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s group, or ASAP, funds collaborative research at university labs around the world. And Stripe cofounder Patrick Collison was a key cofounder of the Arc Institute in 2021, which collaborates with Stanford, UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley.
As for the Weil Cancer Hub West, expectations are high. Says Stanford’s Mackall, “This gift–with a capital G– is going to allow us to keep our foot on the gas and not let up because of other funding challenges.”
More from Forbes
