Surgeon and philanthropist Dr. Gary Michelson and his wife Alya donated $120 million to UCLA to establish the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy, which will be housed in the former Westside Pavilion shopping center in West Los Angeles, the university announced Tuesday.
“The UCLA community is grateful to Alya and Gary Michelson for this transformative gift,” UCLA interim chancellor Darnell Hunt said in a statement. “The Michelsons envisioned an institute that would leverage UCLA’s strengths to maximize public benefit, create new knowledge that leads to better medical treatments, and reshape the study of immunology. The gift will change countless lives here and around the world.”
According to UCLA, $100 million of the donation will be split equally between two of the institute’s research facilities – one focused on rapid vaccine development and the other on “harnessing the microbiome to advance human health.”
University officials said the UCLA Goodman-Luskin Microbiome Center will be among the largest microbiome research facilities in the world.
The other $20 million of the donation will be used to provide research grants to scientists using “novel techniques to advance immunotherapy research, human immunology and vaccine discovery.”
“Immunology is the mediator of nearly all human disease, whether it’s cancer, heart disease or Alzheimer’s,” said Michelson, a spine surgeon who holds nearly 1,000 patents. “The vision of this institute is to become a ‘field of dreams’ – the world’s leading center for immune system research to develop advanced immunotherapies that can prevent, treat and cure all the diseases that plague humans today, and to eradicate these diseases in our lifetimes.”
The research institute will be part of the UCLA Research Park, which is being built in the former Westside Pavilion, where most retail stores were closed by 2020. UCLA purchased the former mall in January.
