Broad Institute gets record-setting gift

By Carey Goldberg, Globe Staff

In a record-setting gift for biomedical research in academia, Los Angeles philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad are donating $400 million to the Cambridge research center that bears their name, boosting the Broad Institute's efforts to unravel the genetic basis of diseases ranging from malaria to cancer.

The money will create an endowment, making permanent what had been a 10-year experiment when it was founded in 2004 with an earlier $100 million gift from the Broads.

The Broad Institute "in a very short time has become, I really believe, number one in the world of genomics," Eli Broad said in a telephone interview. "It's the biggest investment we've ever made, and we think the returns are just great from what we've seen so far."

The Broad Institute came into being in the wake of the federal Human Genome Project, which mapped out the full complement of human genes. A joint project of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, including the Harvard-affiliated hospitals, the institute aimed to bring together scientists across institutions and disciplines to use genomics to understand and attack disease.

The institute began as "an experiment in scientific organization," said Eric Lander, the institute's director. The Broads' new gift after just four years is "an early declaration of success," he said. It is also, he said, "a tribute to Boston" as a scientific center. The Broads are deeply committed to the civic life of Los Angeles, and had tried to lure Lander to California to create a genomics institute, but he convinced them that the intellectual resources of universities and hospitals in the Boston area made it the right place.

Broad said that he is also funding stem cell research in California, but he is convinced that genomics will ultimately prove more important to biomedical research.

Huge as the new gift is, it is only a beginning, Broad and Lander said. The endowment's proceeds will cover only about $20 million of the institute's annual budget of about $150 million a year. Most of the rest comes from federal grants. Broad called for other donors to help support the institute, and said he expected the endowment to reach $1 billion in coming years.

The field of genomics is exploding, with major new insights emerging all the time. Broad Institute researchers alone have published some 350 scientific papers in the last four years. Among work they were involved in:

-- Creating the "HapMap," a seminal catalogue of common genetic variations among people.

-- Learning to define tumors by their gene mutations, rather than simply which organ hosts them.

-- Detecting scores of genes that raise a person's risk for common diseases, including diabetes and Crohn's disease.

-- Making some of the first real progress on the genes involved in mental illness, including autism and schizophrenia.

Thus far, work at the Broad Institute has not led to any new treatments for disease, but Lander said that the center's research had spawned more than a dozen clinical trials, and that four years is far too short in the world of medical research to expect new therapies to be created from scratch.

"The real implications for human health will be felt in the 15-to-20-year timeframe," he said. "There's no accelerating that."

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, which tracks such gifts, the Broads' donation surpasses any other to a US academic institution for biomedical research, though National Taiwan University received $454.5 million last year for cancer research and care.

After their founding gift, the Broads made a second contribution of $100 million to the institute. The new $400 million will be integrated into the same financial structure as these earlier gifts, Lander said, so he considers it a total gift of $600 million. Gordon and Betty Moore gave $600 million to the California Institute of Technology in 2001, but it did not target biomedical research.

The Broads' latest gift is being announced at a news conference this morning in Cambridge.