Former Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill announced Thursday morning a $50 million gift through the Weill Family Foundation to ascertain the Weill Cancer Hub East, a partnership geared toward using research on nutrition and metabolism to develop cancer treatments.
The partnership brings together 4 leading research institutions — with experts from Princeton University, The Rockefeller University, Weill Cornell Medicine and the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research — to develop an immunotherapy technique to fight cancer.
“Good things occur when people imagine in cooperation,” Weill said in an exclusive interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Thursday morning.
Weill’s latest donation marks the muse gifting a complete of greater than $1 billion to nonprofits.
“With the most effective minds in the sphere armed with essentially the most advanced research techniques, the Weill Cancer Hub East will seek to raise immunotherapy and improve patient take care of people battling cancer,” Weill said in a press release.
The brand new partnership will give attention to investigating how nutrition and the microbes that metabolize food can influence immunotherapy and other cancer treatments. The Weill Family Foundation said the hub may also examine how GLP-1 agonists and other emerging therapeutics might affect cancer treatment.
Immunotherapy, unlike other therapies that concentrate on removing or attacking cancer cells directly, uses the patient’s immune system to fight the illness from the within. The hub’s projects will give attention to “reprogramming” the tumor microenvironment, the muse said in a release, and may also offer clinical trials.
“How we will increase the effectiveness of immunotherapy across all cancer types and patients is one in all the scientific questions that almost all needs answering,” said Dr. Robert Harrington, the dean of Weill Cornell Medicine.
The research from the brand new hub is supposed to enrich research and development out of the National Institutes of Health, Weill said, and can’t replace the work the NIH does. Nevertheless, Weill added that he thinks NIH’s work could also be somewhat limited.
“I believe they are not the large risk-takers that they was,” he said on “Squawk Box.” “I believe that it is the job of the private sector to be more of the risk-taker.”
The Weill Family Foundation previously founded one other hub in 2019, called the Weill Neurohub, that pulled together researchers from University of California, San Francisco; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Washington; and the Allen Institute to work on developing treatments for neurological and psychiatric diseases.
