Cancer Survivor Donates $8M For Research At John Wayne Institute

SANTA MONICA, CA — A cancer survivor wants to help advance the future of cancer therapy and treatment and donated $8M to the John Wayne Cancer Institute at Providence Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, officials announced Monday.

The generous donation from the Rosalee and Harold Rae Brown Charitable Foundation will support immunotherapy and genomic research at the John Wayne Cancer Institute at Providence Saint John’s Health Center in its pursuit of expanding treatment options, successful outcomes and improved quality of life for a greater number of cancer patients.

“The Brown Foundation’s gift is the largest donation ever made to JWCI and will be transformative for immunotherapy and precision medicine, cancer research and care,” said Saint John’s Health Center Foundation President and CEO Bob Klein in a news release.

The donation will be counted as part of the Power of Partnership Campaign to raise $200 million for Providence Saint John’s and its affiliate institutes, including JWCI and Pacific Neuroscience Institute.

“This wonderful gift provides us the opportunity to further build on our deep work in immunotherapy and is faithful to the vision of bringing immunotherapy and precision medicine together,” hospital chief executive Michael Ricks said in a news release.

The donation, announced by Harold R. Brown, trustee of the Rosalee and Harold Rae Brown Charitable Foundation, will establish the Rosalie and Harold Brown Cancer Immunotherapy Research Program, named after Harold’s parents. His father died of colon cancer and now, being a cancer patient himself who was treated with immunotherapy, Brown says he wanted to make a gift that would help other people with cancer.

“I’d like to see that magical question answered: the mechanisms that create cancer - and that’s what I’d like to see them find,” Brown says.

“This gift by Harold Brown will be transformational to the JWCI as it allows us to build clinical research programs around the two foundational pillars of cancer scientific discovery, immunotherapy and genomics across integrated solid tumor disease teams. I am thrilled and indebted to Harold for his bold vision and transformational gift,” says Steven O’Day, M.D., executive director of JWCI.

As a life-saving treatment, immunotherapy has grown exponentially since it first was utilized to treat deadly melanoma—a relatively rare form of cancer. Today about 15 different types of cancer have been treated successfully by immunotherapy, and that number is growing, experts say. Unfortunately, immunotherapy does not work for every cancer or every patient. And doctors don’t fully understand why. This is where the synergy between immunotherapy and the second pillar, precision genomic medicine, comes into play.

Precision genomic medicine explores genetic changes in an individual’s tumor that cause a cancer to grow and spread.

“Precision genomic medicine is about interrogating the cancer for specific mutations that may suggest ways to precisely attack the cancer cells,” says Dr. O’Day. The changes that occur in one person’s cancer may not occur in others who have the same type of cancer. Precision genomic medicine can help more accurately predict which treatments and strategies will work for particular tumors—and patients.

Harold Brown says it gives him great satisfaction that his gift will help advance the field in the future. “This kind of gift helps everyone with cancer,” he says. “That’s what it’s all about.”