LOS ANGELES (CNS) – Surgeon and philanthropist Dr. Gary Michelson and his wife Alya donated $120 million to UCLA for its development of the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy that will be housed at the former Westside Pavilion mall in West Los Angeles, the university announced Tuesday.
“The UCLA community owes Alya and Gary Michelson a debt of gratitude for this transformative gift,” UCLA Interim Chancellor Darnell Hunt said in a statement. “The Michelsons envisioned an institute that would leverage UCLA’s strengths for maximum public good, create new knowledge leading to better medical treatments, and reshape the study of immunology. The gift will change countless lives here and across the globe.”
According to UCLA, $100 million of the donation will be equally split between two research entities within the institute — one focusing 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 from the donation will provide research grants to scientists using “novel processes to advance immunotherapy research, humane immunology and vaccine discovery.”
“Immunology is the mediator of nearly all human diseases, whether we’re talking about cancer or heart disease or Alzheimer’s,” according to Michelson, a spine surgeon who holds nearly 1,000 patents. “The vision for this institute is to become a `field of dreams’ — the world’s leading center for the study of the immune system to develop advanced immunotherapies to prevent, treat and cure all of the diseases that afflict people today and to end these diseases in our lifetime.”
The research institute will be part of the UCLA Research Park being built within the former Westside Pavilion, which saw most of its retail stores close by 2020. UCLA purchased the former mall in January.
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