Sandy Weill, the former CEO of Citigroup (C), was lauded for his dealmaking abilities throughout his 50-year career on Wall Street. While the 92-year-old financier has since funneled his efforts into philanthropy since retiring in the mid-2000s, his eye for mergers remains—as evidenced by a new $50 million donation that will bring four institutions together to bolster cancer research.
The funds will establish the Weill Cancer Hub East, a partnership among Princeton University, the Rockefeller University, Weill Cornell Medicine and the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research aimed at increasing the effectiveness of immunotherapy in treating cancer. In addition to the $50 million from the family foundation of Weill and his wife Joan, the initiative will receive a total of more than $125 million from its partner institutions.
“With the best minds in the field armed with the most advanced research techniques, the Weill Cancer Hub East will seek to elevate immunotherapy and improve patient care for people battling cancer,” said Weill in a statement. “Joan and I can’t wait to see all of the innovations that emerge from the initiative.”
Much of the initiative’s work will center upon how nutrition and metabolism impact immunotherapy, a form of cancer care which utilizes a patient’s own immune system to attack the disease. The hub will additionally evaluate whether emerging therapeutics such as GLP-1 agonists, a class of diabetes and anti-obesity drugs that includes Ozempic and Wegovy, have beneficial effects on the immune cells of cancer patients.
Further financing for the initiative will come via future philanthropy from its academic institutions and the commercialization of licensed discoveries enabled by its research efforts. “The funding for this collaboration allows for a deep, mechanistic investigation into how one’s diet, metabolism and microbiome can affect cancer immunotherapy,” said Richard Lifton, president of the Rockefeller University, in a statement.
Weill has donated $1 billion to medical research
Supporting medical research across institutions of higher education has long been a priority for Weill and Joan, who have gifted a total of $1 billion to nonprofits around the globe. In 2016, they donated $185 million to establish a neuroscience research institute at the University of California at San Francisco. Three years later, they helped start the Weill Neurohub, an initiative involving researchers in neurological and psychiatric diseases from UC San Francisco, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Washington and the Allen Institute, through $106 million in funding.
Bringing together institutions with shared goals is nothing new for Weill, who famously helped form Citigroup in 1998 after ushering in the merger of Travelers Group and Citicorp. “I’m doing the same thing I did in the financial business, doing mergers and putting people together that are likeminded,” Weill told CNBC’s Squawk Box in an interview that aired yesterday (March 27). The billionaire, who led Citigroup as CEO for five years, stepped down as the bank’s chairman in 2006 to focus on his philanthropy.