$120M Grant Will Fund Anchor Tenant at UCLA Research Park

Philanthropist Dr. Gary Michelson has pledged $120 million to found a medical institute, the anchor tenant at a UCLA research campus carved from the former Westside Pavilion in West L.A.

The billionaire surgeon-inventor and his wife, Alya, awarded the funds for the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy at the UCLA Research Park at 10800 West Pico Boulevard, two miles south of UCLA’s Westwood campus, the Los Angeles Times and Urbanize Los Angeles reported.

The institute will occupy 360,000 square feet of the 700,000-square-foot medical research and engineering complex under construction in Rancho Park. Terms of the deal appear to avoid a traditional lease.

The institute will operate as a nonprofit medical research organization funded by a public-private partnership and governed by an independent board that includes UCLA representatives, according to a UC Regents document. The institute will pay UCLA 7.5 percent of any net revenues generated by the sale of new medicines and other inventions its scientists create.

In January, the University of California paid $700 million for the former indoor mall, which was in the middle of an office conversion by Hudson Pacific and Macerich, with Google as the target tenant.

Although its redevelopment into a UCLA research campus is expected to take three years, the immunology institute could be up and running in half that time, according to the Times.

Along with the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy, the UCLA Research Park will also house the UCLA Center for Quantum Science and Engineering, plus other science and medicine programs, according to UCLA.

The former Westside Pavilion includes a 12-screen theater that could be converted into lecture halls or performance stages.

The park’s first tenant, the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy, aims to prevent and cure diseases such as cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer’s.

The $120 million award, through the Michelson Medical Research Foundation, includes $100 million to be divided within the institute between vaccine development and microbiome research. The remaining $20 million will seed an endowment offering research grants for young scientists.

The institute will contain different size laboratories for biotech researchers who can start small, then step up to larger labs.

“We’re going to create an entire ecosystem of biotech startups and they’re going to stay right here” and attract other players to the neighborhood, Michelson told the Times.

The immunology institute had been planned for years, while a full-scale research park was something “we’ve always dreamed of having … but we always recognized we could never find a piece of property that big close to campus,” former UCLA Chancellor Gene Block, who was instrumental in the purchase of the former Westside Pavilion, told the Times. “We had sort of given up on the idea many years ago — and it came alive.”

Block said an earlier plan to build the institute on campus called for tearing down a parking garage, digging a hole deep enough to replace the parking and erecting a new building on top.

In addition to the former Westside Pavilion, the University of California bought two other properties to be used as satellites by landlocked UCLA in Westwood.

The purchases include the historic Trust Building in Downtown Los Angeles and the former Marymount California University campus in Rancho Palos Verdes.

— Dana Bartholomew