At Inside Philanthropy, we frequently note that private giving for cancer and other serious diseases, while crucial, is dwarfed in sheer dollar terms by government funding. But a newly announced gift for research into pancreatic cancer, a disease long dreaded for its tough prognosis and dearth of effective treatments, is one case where a single family’s commitment significantly rivals government investment.
That gift, announced this week, provides $150 million to the California-based City of Hope, one of the country’s top centers for cancer research and care. Behind the gift are entrepreneurs A. Emmet Stephenson Jr. and Tessa Stephenson Brand, his daughter. It will fund several initiatives to advance research into pancreatic cancer at City of Hope and benefit researchers around the world. Most notable is the creation of the $1 million Stephenson Prize, to be awarded annually starting in 2025 to a researcher or team that has made what a special board of experts deems to be the most important progress in the fight against pancreatic cancer.
Like many philanthropists, particularly in the health research space, the Stephensons were prompted by personal experience: the 2020 loss of Emmet’s wife and Tessa’s mother Toni Stephenson to pancreatic cancer. The family is, of course, not alone: More than 66,000 people in the US will be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer this year, and nearly 52,000 will die of the disease, making it the third-leading cause of cancer deaths after lung and colorectal cancer.
Emmet and Toni founded several companies in real estate, finance, technology and publishing, among others, including Danahur Corp., a major manufacturer in the healthcare industry. Tessa founded and runs an event-planning company in the Los Angeles area. She’s also an alum of the University of Southern California, where the Stephensons have also supported cancer research, including with a $10 million gift in 2015.
“After the initial shock, we decided together we wanted to turn our grief into action,” said Tessa about the City of Hope commitment. “Both of us being entrepreneurs, we wanted to put our resources to good use and approach this daunting problem in an atypical manner. That’s when the ideas of the Stephenson Prize and the Stephenson Fellowship were born.”
The largest gift in City of Hope’s 110 years
The Stephensons hope the $1 million prize will bring new scientific attention to pancreatic cancer, a disease for which there’s been few significant advances in treatment and outcomes — even as scientists make dramatic improvements in care for other types of cancer. “The goal is to trigger interest worldwide, and that’s why we’ve opened the prize up to anybody in the world that does impressive research in pancreatic cancer,” Emmet Stephenson said. Other funding out of the $150 million gift will also be made available to scientist teams that may not win the prize but are nevertheless conducting promising research – a praiseworthy consideration given prize philanthropy’s typical winner-take-all format.
City of Hope will assemble a scientific advisory board of cancer experts from institutions around the country — including a few from City of Hope itself — as well as internationally, to review proposals for the Stephenson Prize and select winners and research grant recipients, said Kristin Bertell, the institution’s chief philanthropy officer.
The goal will be to address pancreatic cancer from as many angles as possible, including treatment and the particular difficulty of diagnosis. “A lot of times, these patients are not detected [as] having pancreatic cancer until they’re at very late stages,” Bertell said. In fact, most patients live only a few months after their diagnosis. Experts say earlier detection of the disease will be a necessary element of improving treatment and survival rates — one of the many areas where the Stephensons hope their gift can make headway.
As a National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive care center — and one of the largest research and treatment organizations in the U.S. for cancer, not to mention diabetes and other serious diseases — City of Hope has long been in a position to assist many families who then respond with philanthropic support. In fact, Bertell said, the nonprofit receives about 200,000 donations throughout the year from individuals, corporations and foundations. But at $150 million, the Stephenson gift is unique, and is the largest in the organization’s 110-year history.
City of Hope and the Stephensons assembled an impressive to-do list based on the gift. In addition to the $1 million prize, other initiatives enabled by the Stephenson donation include:
- The creation of the Stephenson Fellows Program, which will award grants to researchers in pancreatic cancer.
- An annual Stephenson Pancreatic Cancer Research Symposium to advance new ideas and scientific collaboration.
- Funding to advance novel immunotherapies and support clinical research in pancreatic cancer.
- Creation of a Pancreatic Biorepository at City of Hope to aid research.
- Further investment in City of Hope’s Toni Stephenson Lymphoma Center; prior to her pancreatic cancer diagnosis, Toni was treated for lymphoma at City of Hope.
Other Stephenson family philanthropy has focused on support for their alma maters. Emmet and Toni both received undergraduate degrees from Louisiana State University and supported the school over the years, including with a $25 million gift in 2007. While the family will continue to back other charities, for the foreseeable future, Emmet said the family’s philanthropic focus will remain on pancreatic cancer. “Maybe once it’s solved, we’ll feel differently,” Emmet said. “But right now, this one’s a formidable challenge.”
Offsetting federal underfunding
Zooming out a bit, what’s perhaps most significant about the Stephensons’ commitment to City of Hope is the extent to which it could positively impact the overall supply of funding for pancreatic cancer research. Many philanthropists or foundations have and will continue to make sizable gifts for cancer research — although only a few focus on pancreatic cancer — and while this giving does enable any number of valuable research programs or initiatives, it is, as noted above, typically dwarfed by government funding.
But pancreatic cancer, despite being the third most deadly cancer, is underfunded. In 2022, for example, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) funding budget estimate for pancreatic cancer was $227 million — compare that to $280 million for prostate cancer, $477 million for lung cancer, or $580 million for breast cancer, which do affect more people, but also have lower rates of mortality. The Stephensons’ $150 million gift is roughly two-thirds that of the annual NCI budget for the disease, and the annual $1 million Stephenson prize will be a welcome addition to the funding landscape.
As we’ve discussed before in IP, scientific and medical prizes occupy a particular niche within philanthropy. Some philanthropists, especially those of an entrepreneurial bent, are drawn to establish big-dollar prizes in an effort to generate excitement and build new momentum toward some lofty goal, perhaps an invention — or a cure, as in this case.
Whether these prizes are any more effective at generating progress than traditional grantmaking programs for research is debatable, but there’s no question that they are exciting, and perhaps that alone is a concrete good. In the case of pancreatic cancer, which has remained a dire diagnosis for as long as modern cancer treatment has been practiced, it could be exactly what the doctor ordered.
