Brigham and Women’s Hospital will launch a new institute focused on immunology and inflammation, thanks to a $100 million gift, the largest in the hospital’s history.
The donation, from Gene Lay, founder and CEO of San Diego-based company BioLegend, will establish the Gene Lay Institute of Immunology and Inflammation. The institute will be led by Brigham immunologist and principal investigator Dr. Vijay Kuchroo, who will lead teams dedicated to studying chronic inflammation and discovering drugs for conditions associated with it, such as food allergies and Type 1 diabetes. The institute will also investigate the aging of the immune system and immune dysfunction in cancer.
Under Kuchroo’s leadership, the institute will convene 10 core and 30 affiliated faculty and trainees from the Brigham, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Harvard Medical School.
“My excitement, I cannot describe,” Lay said in an interview. “With this gift, I truly believe under the leadership of these three institutions, this institute will uncover new knowledge that can be translated to therapies.”
Lay and Kuchroo met at an immunology conference decades ago, and their friendship has grown as they worked together through Lay’s company, which makes reagents, tools that researchers use to help identify cells as well as molecules that cells use to communicate. BioLegend provides a repository of reagents that are standardized, helping streamline and speed up scientific discovery.
The company provided kits that Moderna, Pfizer, and BioNTech used during the pandemic. In 2021, BioLegend was acquired by PerkinElmer Inc. for $5.25 billion.
As the pandemic swirled, Lay and Kuchroo began to talk more about immunology, including questions around why older people needed multiple boosters to protect them from COVID, while the young needed fewer.
“The pandemic taught us how important immunology and the immune system is,” Kuchroo said. “I began to talk to Gene, and said it may be a good idea to start an institute that exactly focuses on the problems of the immune system, and how do we exploit it for the better.”
However it wasn’t just the immune system’s response to COVID that the pair found interesting. Kuchroo had learned firsthand the terror of living with severe food allergies, when his son was diagnosed as a child with multiple food allergies, including to peanuts. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that between 1997-1999 and 2009-2011, food allergy prevalence among children increased by 50 percent. .
“I remember going to drop him at school at the bus and my wife asking him, ‘Did you take your EpiPen with you?’ Not, ‘Did you take your lunch with you?’ This problem is rising at an epidemic proportion,” Kuchroo said.
The prevalence of other diseases with roots in immunology and inflammation have also increased, including inflammatory bowel disease, diabetes, and multiple sclerosis.
“Chronic inflammation is the root cause to all these diseases,” Kuchroo said.
Lay purposefully chose Boston, due to the density of people who work in the life sciences.
“One of the issues has been that we have all been siloed. We work for our institutions or our disease,” Kuchroo said. “The visionary gift from Gene will allow us to bring all this community together to go after defined problems, which has never been done before.”
Dr. Robert Higgins, president of Brigham and Women’s, said the gift will also help train the next generation of immunology innovators.
“[Gene] has committed the resources, and we have the innovation and science to address these vexing chronic diseases that make people suffer, and we’re hopeful we can create some solutions,” Higgins said.
While immune-mediated diseases involved in chronic inflammation will be the institute’s first target, the institute will extend its work to focus on the aging of the immune system, better understanding why young adults seem to develop autoimmune diseases — symptoms of an overly robust immune system — while the elderly are disproportionately vulnerable to infections — symptoms of a decaying immune system.
The third focus will look to harness the immune system to fight cancer, using the body’s own tools to regulate tumor growth.
Kuchroo said that with Lay’s gift, scientists will be able to make a map of the pivotal points within genes or proteins that can go awry.
“Philanthropic gifts like this allow you to do it. No other agency will allow you to do a project this big,” he said.
For Lay, the gift has allowed him to extend his company’s mission, to move beyond the research work that his company’s products make possible.
“This institute greatly furthers our longstanding mission to enable legendary discoveries from research to cures,” Lay said.
Jessica Bartlett can be reached at jessica.bartlett@globe.com. Follow her @ByJessBartlett.