Former Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill has donated $50 million to launch a cancer research hub focusing on how diet and metabolism affect patients’ reactions to cancer treatments, he announced Thursday.
The Weill Cancer Hub East – a partnership between Weill Cornell Medicine, Princeton University, Rockefeller University and the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research – will research how patients’ diets, exercise patterns and gut microbiome influence the effectiveness of immunotherapies, which harness patients’ own immune cells to treat cancer. The hub will also investigate how emerging medications, including the popular diabetes and anti-obesity drugs GLP-1 agonists, affect the success of immunotherapies.
“What you eat, how you metabolize it and how your immune system recognizes cancer are logically linked,” said Dr. Jedd Wolchok, director of the Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medicine. “But we are still trying to understand the rules for that.”
Researchers will use the funding to support studies and clinical trials across the four institutions, including one that investigates the relationship between anti-obesity medications and treatment for endometrial cancer, Wolchok said. It will also fund hiring of young faculty members, supporting a pipeline of researchers in the field of immunotherapies down the road, he added.
In addition to the $50 million donation from the Weill Family Foundation — the philanthropic organization created by Weill and his wife Joan — each partner institution will donate funding for a total of $125 million.
Philanthropic funding is a key resource for academic institutions, but has become more critical as President Donald Trump has moved to cut funding from the National Institutes of Health. The administration is aiming to reduce spending on “indirect research costs” for overhead and staffing, which has been blocked by the courts. But some research projects and institutions have already seen the cash stop flowing.
Wolchok initially thought the private donation would leverage existing projects that already had funding, helping them reach new heights. “Now that we are looking at uncertainties in terms of other sources of cancer research funding, this may be one way that we can maintain the status quo,” he said.
The Weill family and its philanthropic organization have gifted $1 billion to nonprofits in the U.S. and around the globe. The foundation formed the Weill Neurohub in 2019, a partnership between UC San Francisco, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Washington and the Allen Institute to investigate treatments for neurological diseases.
