Gerstner Philanthropies Makes New$15 Million Commitment to Create the Gerstner Center for Cancer Diagnostics at the Broad Institute
The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard announced today a new $15 million commitment by Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., former CEO and chairman of the board of IBM Corporation, and current chairman of the board of directors of the Broad Institute, to create the Gerstner Center for Cancer Diagnostics at the Broad Institute. The new Center will be endowed with an additional commitment of $10 million by the Eli & Edythe Broad Foundation.
The Gerstner Center aims to advance blood-based biopsies for tracking disease progression and pursue other cancer diagnostics that have the potential to benefit millions of patients worldwide. The new Center builds upon a major effort at Broad focused on elucidating the mechanisms of cancer drug resistance, launched by a $10 million commitment from the Gerstner Family Foundation in 2015. This work has already given rise to a major project with IBM Watson Health to understand and prevent cancer progression, supported by $50 million in funding to create and make freely available to the scientific community data about cancer resistance.
While many aspects of cancer treatment have improved substantially over the past decade, diagnostics have lagged. Today, in order for a doctor to monitor a patient’s disease progression or response to treatment, they must either obtain a surgical tumor biopsy or send the patient for a CT or MRI scan. These approaches can be costly, invasive, and most importantly, provide no molecular insights...