Philanthropists Joan and Sandy Weill

Sanford “Sandy” Weill, the former CEO and chairman of banking giant Citigroup, and his wife Joan have been big donors to medical research on both coasts of the U.S. Now, the couple are taking it up a notch. On Wednesday, two Bay Area universities–University of California, San Francisco and Stanford University–announced a $100 million gift over 10 years from the Weill Family Foundation for a new cancer hub that is designed to advance cancer research and treatment via four specific projects.

The gift, a matching grant, has the goal of raising an additional $100 million for the new initiative, called the Weill Cancer Hub West. A quarter of the matching funds have already been raised, the universities said.

“I think the time for cancer is now,” Sam Hawgood, UC San Francisco’s chancellor, tells Forbes. Hawgood cites advances in technology and cancer research including advanced computation and the ability to sequence the genomes of single cells at scale. “Those kinds of tools open up a whole new opportunity space–and the space is almost too big for any single university.”

Though the death rate from cancer has fallen by about a third in the past quarter century–partly due these better tools, cancer is still on the rise, with almost 20 million new cases annually and about 10 million deaths globally each year.

Sandy Weill, who retired as Citigroup CEO in 2003 and as chairman in 2006 and dropped off Forbes’ billionaires list in 2022 as a result of his charitable giving, is now age 92 and devoting most of his time to philanthropy via he and Joan’s $425 million (assets) charitable foundation. He’s a big fan of collaborative research. “When people are willing to partner and collaborate with other bright people, you get a much better chance of coming to a solution,” Weill said in an interview at his home in Sonoma, California last week.

The Weill Cancer Hub West will harness recent promising developments to tackle cancer. One project will use the gene editing tool CRISPR to engineer immune cells inside the body by injecting the CRISPR machinery into a patient, deliver it to a patient’s immune cells, and reprogram those cells to go after the cancer. Jennifer Doudna, the UC Berkeley biochemist who shared the Nobel prize in chemistry 2020 for the CRISPR gene editing breakthrough, will participate in this research effort as........

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