Smilow Foundation gives Penn Medicine $25 million for a heart gene-editing center

The Smilow Foundation, led by William Smilow, has given $25 million to establish the Smilow Center for Precision Therapeutics at Penn Medicine, the health system announced on October 8. The center will work on gene editing and other precision therapies aimed at the underlying causes of cardiovascular disease.

The center will be led by Thomas P. Cappola, chief of the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, who already holds the William Smilow Professorship. Penn Medicine said the center aims to develop curative therapies for heart disease and will run first-in-human clinical trials.

A donor with a long tie to Penn

The gift builds on earlier Smilow giving at Penn. The professorship was founded in 2012 by William Smilow and his late father, Joel Smilow, as part of the gift that named the Smilow Center for Translational Research on Penn's medical campus. The foundation's other leadership gifts include Yale's Smilow Cancer Hospital and NYU Langone Medical Center, according to the announcement.

William Smilow, the foundation's president and CEO, is also a member of the Penn Medicine Board, the Penn Cardiovascular Institute Leadership Council and the Penn Medicine Development Leadership Cabinet. "Heart disease has touched my family personally, which makes this mission genuinely meaningful to me," he said in the announcement.

What the money is meant to do

Penn Medicine said the center will bring together its departments of cardiovascular medicine, physiology, systems pharmacology and translational therapeutics, bioengineering and radiology. It named Kiran Musunuru and Drew Weissman as pioneers the center will draw on in CRISPR and mRNA technologies. Musunuru has developed gene-editing therapies to permanently lower cholesterol levels, according to the announcement.

"The Smilow Foundation has made an extraordinary commitment to advancing groundbreaking research with the potential to achieve what was once considered impossible: curing previously debilitating forms of heart disease," said Jonathan A. Epstein, dean of the Perelman School of Medicine, in the announcement.

The announcement does not say over how many years the $25 million will be paid, whether any of it is endowed, or how the center will be staffed. Penn Medicine has not published a timeline for the first clinical trials.

What donors and boards can take from it

In our view, two points are worth noting. First, this is a repeat gift from a family that has given to the same institution for well over a decade, a reminder that much major-donor giving grows out of long relationships rather than first asks. Second, the donor sits on the board of the health system receiving the gift. That is common and legal, but it is the kind of arrangement a board should manage openly, with a written gift agreement and a conflict-of-interest policy that covers donors who also govern.