Ludwig Center at Johns Hopkins to receive $90 million in new funding

Scientists at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center will receive $90 million in new funding as part of a $540 million gift from Ludwig Cancer Research, on behalf of its founder Daniel K. Ludwig, to six U.S. institutions. The new award is among the largest for a single private gift to cancer research.

Bert Vogelstein, M.D., and Kenneth Kinzler, Ph.D., co-directors of the Ludwig Center at Hopkins, used an initial $20 million Ludwig gift to establish the Center and create the first genomic maps of cancer in 2006. Since then, their team has cracked the genetic codes of more than a dozen different forms of cancer, including breast, colon, brain, pancreas, ovarian and head and neck cancers and has published discoveries of newly linked cancer genes from each map.

"The Ludwig bequests have revolutionized what we've been able to do," says Vogelstein, Ludwig Center co-director, as well as the Clayton Professor in Oncology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at Johns Hopkins. "We've pursued some of the most important questions in cancer – not necessarily the most fundable questions."

With the new gift, Ludwig's commitment to cancer research at the six U.S.-based institutions now totals approximately $900 million and another $1.6 billion globally. The five other Ludwig Centers to share in the current award are: Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago.