Former Citi CEO Sandy Weill launches new cancer research hub focused on immunotherapy

Former Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill announced Thursday morning a $50 million gift through the Weill Family Foundation to establish the Weill Cancer Hub East, a partnership aimed at using research on nutrition and metabolism to develop cancer treatments.

The partnership brings together four leading research institutions — with experts from Princeton University, The Rockefeller University, Weill Cornell Medicine and the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research — to develop an immunotherapy strategy to fight cancer.

“Good things happen when people believe in cooperation,” Weill said in an exclusive interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Thursday morning.

Weill’s latest donation marks the foundation gifting a total of more than $1 billion to nonprofits.

“With the best minds in the field armed with the most advanced research techniques, the Weill Cancer Hub East will seek to elevate immunotherapy and improve patient care for people battling cancer,” Weill said in a statement.

The new partnership will focus on investigating how nutrition and the microbes that metabolize food can influence immunotherapy and other cancer treatments. The Weill Family Foundation said the hub will also examine how GLP-1 agonists and other emerging therapeutics might affect cancer treatment.

Immunotherapy, unlike other therapies that target removing or attacking cancer cells directly, uses the patient’s immune system to fight the illness from the inside. The hub’s projects will focus on “reprogramming” the tumor microenvironment, the foundation said in a release, and will also offer clinical trials.

“How we can increase the effectiveness of immunotherapy across all cancer types and patients is one of the scientific questions that most needs answering,” said Dr. Robert Harrington, the dean of Weill Cornell Medicine.

The research from the new hub is meant to complement research and development out of the National Institutes of Health, Weill said, and cannot replace the work the NIH does. However, Weill added that he thinks NIH’s work may be somewhat limited.

“I think they’re not the big risk-takers that they used to be,” he said on “Squawk Box.” “I think that it’s the job of the private sector to be more of the risk-taker.”

The Weill Family Foundation previously founded another hub in 2019, called the Weill Neurohub, that pulled together researchers from University of California, San Francisco; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Washington; and the Allen Institute to work on developing treatments for neurological and psychiatric diseases.