Columbia University announced Thursday that its medical school has received $400 million to fund a new institute for basic biomedical research to fuel future discoveries that could improve human health and lead to new drug discoveries.
The gift, from Columbia alumni Roy and Diana Vagelos, is the largest single donation given to the school and brings to $900 million the total given to Columbia by the couple since 2010. Roy Vagelos is widely known in medicine as the former chair and CEO of the drugmaker Merck.
The new gift will fund the Roy and Diana Vagelos Institute for Basic Biomedical Science, which will support the hiring of investigators and fund research in areas such as cell engineering and gene therapies, especially projects that might be risky and pay off only after years or decades of work.
“It’s always tempting in science to focus on incremental advances that are safe and NIH-fundable that will lead to immediate publications,” Samuel Sternberg, an HHMI investigator and assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics, told STAT.
Sternberg was recruited to Columbia in 2018 from Bay Area CRISPR startup Caribou Biosciences and given a generous startup package from previous Vagelos donations. It has led to his lab’s discoveries in bacteria of previously unknown free-floating and ephemeral genes and a possible new method of gene expression that had gone overlooked.
“I didn’t have to worry about that first year being productive,” Sternberg said. “I could dream big.”
Sternberg, who earned his Ph.D. with CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna at the University of California, Berkeley, said the Vagelos funding brought a startup and boundary-pushing mentality to Columbia, something he said that he has seen in institutes in California and Boston, but not necessarily in New York.
“It’s important to have the flexibility to really think big and to think about things that are doable five or ten years in the future. In the worlds of cell and gene therapy, what can we dream about doing,” he said. He added that he thought the insight Vagelos could provide from his long experience with drug development could help speed the translation of basic research into tangible cures. “It’s not just supporting research with money, it’s his energy and spirit,” he said.
Columbia’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, called the gift historic and said in a statement it will “allow us to build the world’s foremost ecosystem for biomedical research and to attract the next generation of exceptionally creative and collaborative scientists.”
Previous donations from the couple to the school include a 2023 gift of $175 million to launch the Vagelos Institute for Biomedical Research Education, which supports faculty and doctoral students taking on riskier projects that might not be supported elsewhere. In 2017, the couple donated $100 million to support work in precision medicine and another $150 million to eliminate loans for Columbia medical students who qualify for financial aid — a form of philanthropy that has since been replicated at other medical schools in an effort to make medical education more affordable. Columbia’s medical school, the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, is named after them as well.
Vagelos, the child of Greek immigrants who received his education through scholarships, earned his medical degree from Columbia in 1954; it was there he met Diana, who graduated from Barnard College and has long supported causes involving women’s health and the arts. He has had a long and storied career, authoring more than 100 scientific papers, working at the National Institutes of Health in lipid metabolism research, and serving as chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at Washington University in St. Louis.
After leaving academia, Vagalos spent 19 years at Merck, headquartered in his hometown of Rahway, N.J., becoming board chair and CEO. He is known for encouraging the company to make its river blindness treatment, ivermectin, free to African countries that could not afford the high price of the drug. He spent three decades as chair of the board of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals before retiring last year.
“Diana and I want to help create an environment that will allow generations of scientists to fuel discoveries that address the most challenging problems in health and medicine,” Roy Vagelos said in a statement. “We envision that this Institute will remove barriers for talented individuals so that they can learn, collaborate, innovate, and explore the important questions in biomedical science that they are most passionate about. This is what inspired my career, and I am hoping we can provide these same opportunities for others.”
Vagelos is now 94, but shows no signs of slowing down. He’s been a fixture at Columbia biochemistry department retreats — sitting in the front row, furiously taking notes — and frequently calls Sternberg to pepper him with questions about his latest research. “I was at his 90th birthday celebration a number of years ago,” said Sternberg. “If anything, I’ve seen his energy go up since then.”