The last couple of decades have seen a sharp rise in inflammatory and immune-mediated disease, including conditions like nut and other food allergies that are suddenly common among current generations of children. At the same time, researchers are pushing to understand the role of the immune system and inflammation as both a cause and a key to treatment of many diseases, including cancer and diabetes.
Some of philanthropy’s participation has been at the individual grant level — that is, a few million dollars here and there to support individual research studies. Givers who’ve made multimillion-dollar commitments in allergy and immune-related research studies include billionaire David Koch (prior to his death in 2019) and the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust.
But deep-pocketed funders have also stepped up to build what can be described as research infrastructure, with one illustrative example being Sean Parker’s philanthropy in this space. Parker, who built a fortune in tech, has serious food allergies that have landed him in the emergency room numerous times, and that’s given him first-hand knowledge of the life-threatening nature of immune-related health conditions. In 2014, he made a $24 million pledge to create an allergy research center at Stanford University.
However, the task of taking on these questions and challenges is simply too large for any single lab or institution, which is why creating national and even global organizational structures to enable collaboration can be such an important role for big-gift philanthropy. In Parker’s case, a couple years after that 2014 pledge, he funded immunology-related research from another angle and with a much larger commitment: $250 million to establish an institute to advance the promising but still-developing field of cancer immunotherapy. The Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy enables collaboration across labs and scientists at six top U.S. cancer research centers.
Fast forward to today: A recent $100 million commitment to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston to launch a new institute to understand the role of the immune system and inflammation is the latest move to create the kind of collaborative scientific infrastructure that can help solve these central puzzles of human health. The funding came from biotechnology businessman Gene Lay through his Laygend Foundation.
Lay, who was born in Taiwan, is the founder and CEO of BioLegend Inc., which makes antibodies, proteins, assays and other products used in life sciences research and diagnostics. In 2021, BioLegend was acquired by PerkinElmer Inc. (now known as Revvity Inc.) for $5.25 billion, presumably bumping up Lay’s net worth substantially.
As a result of his business activities, Lay developed close relationships with biomedical researchers across the U.S. and around the world. Last year, Lay gave $25 million to UC San Diego’s bioengineering program. But his recent gift to Brigham and Woman’s Hospital ups the ante. It’s the largest in the hospital’s history.
Although it’s located and administered at Brigham and Women’s, Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical School are also part of the new Gene Lay Institute of Immunology and Inflammation. This creates a scientific powerhouse infrastructure to coordinate the work of immunology and biomedical investigators at each of those institutions. Other institutions, including the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute, will also be involved in some research projects. The institute will also provide training for students and early-career research fellows.
Vijay Kuchroo, an immunologist and investigator at Brigham and Women’s Hospital — and a longtime professional acquaintance of Lay — will serve as the new institute’s inaugural director. I asked him about the need to knit together these teams of scientists and different areas of expertise.
“These are big questions that not any one particular scientist or physician can solve,” Kuchroo told me. “You need the basic scientists doing the experiments. You need computational biologists to sift through the data, looking for this needle in the haystack. You need the patient population from the hospital. And then you need people to develop molecules and antibodies that may help us solve the problem.”
Primary areas of study at the new institute will include research to understand the basic function of immune-mediated diseases and aging. Also under study is cancer and newer immunotherapies that have shown some promise in treating cancer, but which are still incompletely understood. It’s not clear, for example, why immunotherapy cures some cancer patients and not others.
Meanwhile, scientists are working to understand the reason for a rise in immune-related and inflammatory conditions over the last few decades. Many researchers assume the causes include recent changes in our environment and lifestyle, including changes in our food supply, and in the microbiota of bacteria and parasites that surround us and live within us. While immune-mediated conditions and inflammatory disease affect people everywhere, some of these health issues have been rising much faster in the U.S. and other wealthier countries. Now-common childhood nut allergies, for example, which can be life-threatening, were rare in the U.S. in previous generations, and they remain rare today in many less-wealthy nations.
But what has also become clear in recent decades is that chronic inflammation is a root cause of many diseases, including long-recognized conditions like allergies and autoimmune diseases, but also spanning cancer, neurodegenerative conditions, cardiovascular disease and metabolic diseases. And it is also clear, as Kuchroo said, that new nation-spanning and globe-spanning research organizations will be needed to make progress against these health challenges.
