American philanthropists and entrepreneurs Eli and Edythe Broad announced today they are investing an additional $100 million into the Broad Institute to launch a new decade of transformative work to harness recent biomedical discoveries to benefit patients.
This gift brings their total contributions to the institute to $700 million since its founding nearly a decade ago — and makes the Broads the second largest donors ever to a university, hospital, or research institute for biomedical research.
The Broad Institute was founded in 2003 as an unprecedented model of research collaboration, bringing together scientists from across the MIT and Harvard communities, including the Harvard-affiliated teaching hospitals, and from diverse disciplines including biology, medicine, chemistry, and computer science.
discovering and developing diverse chemical compounds that can target those vulnerabilities.
Over the last decade, Broad researchers have led pioneering work in human biology that forms the cornerstone of its next decade of research. This includes the development and application of state-of-the-art genomic methods that have propelled the discovery of hundreds of genes at play in major human diseases, including common diseases like type 2 diabetes and early-onset heart disease; psychiatric diseases such as autism and schizophrenia; autoimmune diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease and rheumatoid arthritis; infectious diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis; dozens of cancers; and many others.
In the next decade, Broad researchers will apply this knowledge to develop therapeutic roadmaps for a variety of human diseases, enabling a new world of more precise and effective treatment options for patients.
The Broads’ $100 million gift is their fourth gift to the Broad Institute. In 2004, an initial $100 million investment launched the institute, and was followed a year later by a second $100 million. In 2008, the Broads pledged $400 million to endow and establish the Broad Institute as an independent non-profit scientific research institution, making it a permanent part of the biomedical landscape. Their combined contributions make them the second largest donors to a single organization for biomedical research.
The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard was founded in 2003 to empower this generation of creative scientists to transform medicine with new genome-based knowledge. The Broad Institute seeks to describe all the molecular components of life and their connections; discover the molecular basis of major human diseases; develop effective new approaches to diagnostics and therapeutics; and disseminate discoveries, tools, methods, and data openly to the entire scientific community.
Founded by MIT, Harvard and its affiliated hospitals, and the visionary Los Angeles philanthropists Eli and Edythe L. Broad, the Broad Institute includes faculty, professional staff, and students from throughout the MIT and Harvard biomedical research communities and beyond, with collaborations spanning over a hundred private and public institutions in more than 40 countries worldwide. For further information about the Broad Institute, go to www.broadinstitute.org.
Eli Broad and his wife, Edythe, established The Broad Foundations to advance entrepreneurship for the public good in education, science and the arts. The Broad Foundations, which include The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and The Broad Art Foundation, have assets of $2.6 billion. The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation’s investments in scientific and medical research are focused on three areas: human genomics, stem cell research and inflammatory bowel disease. The foundation’s largest investment has been in establishing and endowing The Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, which has become the world’s leading genomic medicine research institute. For more information, visit www.broadfoundation.org.