Recent gifts to support cancer research at Weill Cornell have brought the institution to the forefront of innovation in the fight against this insidious disease.
Thanks in great part to the 2014 gift of $75 million from Sandra and Edward Meyer to fund cancer research, the Meyer Cancer Center, headquartered within the Belfer Research Building, has grown exponentially in the last two years. Dr. Lewis Cantley, Meyer Director of the center, is thrilled about its precedented growth, and credits much of this progress to philanthropy.
“Philanthropy at Weill Cornell Medicine helps us build new infrastructures so that we’re doing experiments that no one else in the world is doing,” says Dr. Cantley. “It is expediting the time that it takes to get new therapies to patients.”
The Meyer Cancer Center works in tandem with the Englander Institute for Precision Medicine, named in 2015 thanks to a significant investment from Caryl and Overseer Israel Englander and led by Dr. Mark Rubin, the Homer T. Hirst III Professor of Oncology in Pathology.
“When we began in precision medicine, our clinical decisions were based on evaluation of a relatively small number of genes,” says Dr. Cantley. “We are now leaders in this field – we can evaluate all 23,000 genes – and by doing this broader analysis, we are catching things that we otherwise might have missed.”
In honor of past research that has provided scientists with a greater understanding of the disease, funds provided for cancer research are more impactful than ever before, says Dr. Cantley.
“We now know in so much more detail the science of why cancers emerge and why they evolve and become resistant,” he says. “We have made remarkable progress just in the last year, particularly in the advancement of novel research and in the area of recruitment. But we’re not finished.”