A $100 million matching grant from the Weill Family Foundation will fund a new joint initiative between UCSF and Stanford Medicine, aimed at accelerating cancer research and treatment development over the next decade.

The program, named the Weill Cancer Hub West, will be anchored by the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Stanford Cancer Institute. Both institutions have pledged to raise an additional $100 million in matching donations, bringing the total investment to $200 million. The effort has already secured more than $25 million toward that goal.

The project builds on previous philanthropic collaborations led by Joan and Sanford Weill, whose foundation has committed over $400 million in support of biomedical science in the Bay Area. The new hub will facilitate shared research, infrastructure, and staffing between the two institutions, and aims to foster early detection technologies, new cancer therapies, and expanded use of data science in oncology.
“The fight against cancer is one of the defining health challenges of our time,” said Stanford president Jonathan Levin. “Stanford and UCSF are well positioned to advance the collaborative, next-generation research that will make a meaningful difference in the lives of countless people.”

Initial research will focus on four areas: in-body immune cell engineering (Project VITAL), treatment-resistant tumors (Project PROMISE), precision nutrition and drug interactions (Project FEAST), and AI-driven personalized medicine (Project IMPACT).

Researchers involved include leaders in cell therapy, data science, and oncology. Among them are Justin Eyquem and Kole Roybal at UCSF, and Rushika Perera, co-leading efforts on diet-based cancer interventions.

The Weill Cancer Hub West follows a similar model to the recently announced Weill Cancer Hub East, a collaboration between Weill Cornell Medicine, Princeton University, Rockefeller University, and the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research.

Both hubs are modeled after the 2019 Weill Neurohub, which connected neuroscience programs across four institutions on the West Coast.

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