Penn Medicine Receives $50 Million Gift to Fund Early-Stage Cancer, Autoimmune and Infectious Disease Research
核心洞察
Penn Medicine (搜索) has received a $50 million gift from businessman Stanley C. Middleman to support early-stage research into cancer (搜索), autoimmune diseases (搜索) and infectious diseases (搜索).
The donation establishes the Middleman Fund and renames Penn's expanded 3600 Civic Center Blvd. building as the Middleman Center, housing the Colton Center for Autoimmunity.
The 217,000-square-foot, $376 million expansion added seven floors with as many as 37 labs, plus a High-Throughput Institute for Discovery and a Biosafety Level 3 lab.
Penn Medicine (搜索) has received a $50 million gift from Philadelphia businessman Stanley C. Middleman to accelerate early-stage research into cancer (搜索), autoimmune diseases (搜索), infectious diseases (搜索) and other serious conditions, the health system announced Thursday. The donation — Middleman's first to Penn — creates the Middleman Fund and will rename a recently expanded research building at 3600 Civic Center Blvd. in his honor.
The gift's purpose is explicitly translational: income from the fund will be used to accelerate work on therapies for these conditions, with a goal of shortening the path from the laboratory to the market, Penn said. Penn Medicine (搜索) did not disclose the amount in its own announcement; the $50 million total was reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer.
A New Home for Autoimmunity and Discovery Research
The building now known as the Middleman Center underwent a $376 million, 217,000-square-foot expansion that opened last year, adding seven floors that include as many as 37 laboratories. Penn originally opened the building in 2018 with eight floors and 250,000 square feet of office space, which has also been renovated.
The new floors house the Colton Center for Autoimmunity at Penn (搜索), part of a global research effort to advance diagnosis and treatment of autoimmune diseases (搜索), along with the High-Throughput Institute for Discovery, a specialized lab that tests patient samples to help make diagnoses and guide treatments. The Middleman Center also includes a Biosafety Level 3 lab equipped to handle infectious disease specimens. Biomedical and infectious disease researchers, as well as experts in health care innovation, will also be housed there.
"Anchoring the western edge of Penn Medicine (搜索)'s campus, the Middleman Center is uniquely positioned to bring together biomedical researchers, physicians, medical students, patients, and experts from engineering, business, and other areas of the University of Pennsylvania," Penn President J. Larry Jameson said in the release. "This creates an extraordinary environment for discovery — not just sparking ideas but seeing them all the way through to the moments where lives change for the better, as a result of discovery."
Building on CAR T and mRNA Foundations
Penn Medicine (搜索) was the pioneer of CAR T cell therapy (搜索), an immunotherapy approach that trains a patient's immune cells to recognize and destroy cancer (搜索), and has been at the forefront of mRNA (搜索) research underlying the development of COVID-19 (搜索) vaccines as well as advances in cancer therapies.
Kevin B. Mahoney, chief executive officer of the University of Pennsylvania Health System, said the Middleman Fund "will help sustain that progress at the cutting edge of medicine, build on emerging findings, and create new paths for exploration across a broad range of diseases and disciplines."
Middleman, founder and chief executive officer of Freedom Mortgage and vice chair of the Philadelphia Phillies, framed the gift around translational ambition. "I was born and raised in Philadelphia, and I'm proud to support Penn Medicine (搜索) and the extraordinary work being done there to advance medicine and improve people's lives," he said in the news release. "My hope is that the Middleman Fund will fuel the development of lifesaving therapies and new approaches to treating patients, and that the Middleman Center will bring together the people and ideas to make those breakthroughs possible."
Middleman founded privately owned Freedom Mortgage Corp. in South Jersey in 1990 and grew it into one of the nation's largest lenders before moving its headquarters to Florida in the early 2020s. He has previously made donations to his alma mater, Temple University, and to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, which named the main patient tower at its King of Prussia hospital for Middleman's family.