The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation directed a $1-million gift to the Division of Digestive Diseases to assist in the creation of the Center for Gastroenterology Systems Biology, which will focus on research on chronic inflammatory conditions such as Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. The Broad Foundation's giving to the division totals $5.5 million, including a named chair and a clinical program and laboratory in inflammatory bowel disease.
Mrs. Barbara Kort made a generous gift to underwrite Dr. Helena Chang's extraordinary work on behalf of women's health and overcoming breast cancer. Part of the donation will fund the Barbara Kort Santa Monica Women's Imaging Center, which performs state-of-the-art breast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), screening mammography, diagnostic mammography, imaging-guided needle biopsy (ultrasound, stereotactic, and MRI), and ductography. It also will fund Dr. Chang's breast-cancer research to develop a biomarker-based predicting model to identify the drug-resistant triple-negative breast cancer, which is extremely aggressive and more likely to recur and metastasize than other subtypes of breast cancer, as well as a drug combination for treatment.
The Moss Foundation has made a $2.5-million gift to the Department of Surgery to fund an endowed chair in gastrointestinal and personalized surgery, a new area that provides targeted therapies for patients based upon their genomic profile (hereditary information). Ann and Jerry Moss are visionary UCLA friends and philanthropists whose gift focuses on surgical treatment, research, and teaching in gastrointestinal diseases. It will underwrite the work of a world-class surgeon with expertise in translational targeted therapy and in the genomics and biobanking of surgical specimens in order to build a personalized-medicine program.
Jane and Terry Semel have made a $10-million gift to support the "Promoting Healthy Behaviors through Innovative Science" project. This initiative will build a campus hub for faculty and students dedicated to health promotion through novel investigations within the Jane and Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. The funding will be used to foster and facilitate an integrated education and research program, as well as a new research tower as part of the Semel Institute.
The Jonsson Cancer Center Foundation has been notified of a planned gift of just over $900,000, established by Robert Smith and the late Esther Smith, to underwrite world-class cancer research.
In gratitude for his father's lifesaving surgery at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, 27-year-old Eric Tamura established the Randall A. Tamura Family Scholarship at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. The $50,000 gift ($10,000 per year for five years) will be awarded to medical students who plan to pursue a career in pulmonology, a subspecialty of internal medicine concerned with respiratory diseases.
The Wolfen Family Foundation has made a gift of $1 million to the Jonsson Cancer Center Foundation to continue its support of the Wolfen Family Lung Cancer Clinical/Translational Research Program under the direction of Dr. Dennis Slamon. To date, the Wolfen Family Foundation has contributed more than $3 million to advance lung cancer research at UCLA.
