Landmark Gift Is a Game Changer in the Pursuit to End Cancer | Spring 2024 | Miami Magazine | University of Miami

AS HE TRAVELED SOUTH ON INTERSTATE 75 IN BROWARD COUNTY ON AN EARLY TUESDAY MORNING, ALL CHRIS CUNNINGHAM KNEW ABOUT THE EVENT TO WHICH HE WAS ENROUTE WAS THAT IT HAD SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE NAMING OF A BUILDING UNDER CONSTRUCTION ON THE UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI MEDICAL CAMPUS.

Cunningham, who is waging a successful battle against cancer, could have easily skipped the function, but something told him it was important. So he, along with his daughter and 91-year-old mother, made the 23-mile trip from their Pembroke Pines home to Miami’s health district, arriving an hour before the ceremony’s 10 a.m. start.

Then, inside an air-conditioned tent on the campus’s Schoninger Research Quadrangle, he heard the news that will impact his life and scores of other cancer patients like him: Billionaire businessman and philanthropist Kenneth C. Griffin, founder and CEO of the multinational Miami-based hedge fund firm Citadel and the founder of Griffin Catalyst, had donated $50 million to Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, marking a new era in its already prodigious efforts to treat and find a cure for the disease.

“This is game-changing,” Cunningham says of the gift to the only National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center in South Florida, which is part of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and UHealth – University of Miami Health System.

Diagnosed with a form of marginal zone lymphoma in early November 2023, Cunningham has undergone several rounds of radiation therapy, and today his health is improving. The news of Griffin’s gift bolstered his spirits, inspiring him to make a bold prediction. “In our lifetimes, we’re going to find a cure for cancer, and when we do, the press conference is going to be held here, because it’s going to be Miami Hurricane researchers who find it,” he declares.

Gift’s Impact

Griffin’s landmark gift will help fund a 12-story, 244,000-square-foot cancer research building, allowing Sylvester to double its research footprint, accelerate efforts to develop new therapies, expand access to clinical trials, and enhance patient care. In recognition of the gift, which is part of the University’s $2.5 billion Ever Brighter fundraising campaign, the facility will be named the Kenneth C. Griffin Cancer Research Building. It is scheduled to open in 2025.

Griffin, who grew up in Boca Raton, Florida, and moved to Miami-Dade County two years ago, says the decision to support Sylvester and UHealth was an easy one. “There is no doubt that Sylvester will continue to be at the forefront of science and care and at the forefront of saving people’s lives,” Griffin says. “With this team, we are leading the way to being one day closer to achieving our shared goal of ending the threat of cancer in our lifetime.”

“Transformative” and “catalytic” is how Dr. Stephen D. Nimer, director of Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, described the Griffin gift. The building it will help construct represents more than simply a doubling of research space, he notes. It will allow Sylvester to create powerful teams of researchers and clinicians and attract and retain the most promising, productive, and collaborative cancer researchers who will work closely together to achieve breakthroughs in eradicating the disease.

With this team, we are leading the way to being one day closer to achieving our shared goal of ending the threat of cancer in our lifetime.

“Cancer research is a team sport, and as a cancer center, we have done our best to co-localize, in our existing space, our groups of scientists by discipline, disease, or mechanism,” says Nimer, the Oscar de la Renta Endowed Chair in Cancer Research and executive dean for research at the Miller School. “Now, with the new research building, our teams of the best and brightest bench scientists will be able to work fully alongside one another, together with computational and systems biologists and bioinformaticians to more quickly catalyze discoveries.”

Three floors of the new facility will be dedicated to clinical care, further inspiring Sylvester’s teams of cancer researchers, Nimer points out.

“We have an incredible opportunity to have bench scientists work in the same building that we deliver patient care,” Nimer explains. “Patients will receive lifesaving treatment where key discoveries are being made. The facility will also enable even more patients in the region to participate in clinical research, receive more effective and less toxic treatments, and help us realize the promise of precision medicine. This building will support our survivorship program and our community outreach and education efforts, serving as a source of inspiration and hope.”

This gift, says Dr. Dipen J. Parekh, chief operating officer of UHealth and the founding director of the Desai Sethi Urology Institute, “elevates outstanding cancer research that will have the highest impact, giving us the ability to develop targeted treatments for our patients with the most complex cases.” He points out that UHealth is expanding across the region to fulfill its mission as an academic health system. “And ultimately, Mr. Griffin’s vision and generosity lifts our entire health enterprise and community,” he says.

The $50 million gift will also help propel the Miller School into the upper echelons of elite research-focused medical schools, according to Dr. Henri Ford, dean and chief academic officer of the school. “Research is the foundation for innovation. It’s the basis for most of the clinical interventions that we make,” says Ford. “And being able to have the capacity to attract more preeminent cancer researchers and offer them first-class research facilities to do their work is going to position the Miller School among the truly elite research medical schools that are translating fundamental discoveries into clinical interventions to improve the health of humanity.”