donor

The man who invented modern advertising put his fortune and his methods behind medical research, founding the Lasker Foundation with his wife Mary in 1942; after his death in 1952 she carried the campaign for cancer research into law.

In the 1940s the General Motors chairman joined engineer Charles Kettering to establish the Sloan Kettering Institute, dedicated in 1948, which gave Memorial Hospital a research arm and its modern name.

After her husband Robert was diagnosed with advanced colon cancer in 1987 at 46, she turned the family's fortune to Northwestern's cancer centre, which carries his name, and to the children's hospital that carries both.

The Gates Foundation has committed $4.1 billion to Gavi, the vaccine alliance it helped found in 2000, whose HPV programme had fully immunised nearly 60 million girls against cervical cancer by the end of 2024.

After his mother died of melanoma he organised a bike ride across Massachusetts in 1980 with 36 riders; the Pan-Mass Challenge has since raised $1.125 billion for Dana-Farber and passes on every rider-raised dollar.

The inventor of the electric car starter and head of General Motors research joined Alfred Sloan in the 1940s to establish the Sloan Kettering Institute for cancer research.

In 1971 he put nearly all of his international holdings into a cancer research institute that carries his name reluctantly; it has since spent more than $1.8 billion of its own money on cancer science.

Treated for prostate cancer from 1992, he gave MIT $100 million in 2007 to build an institute that puts engineers and cancer biologists under one roof, and MSK $150 million in 2015 for a new outpatient cancer building.

Her 2007 melanoma diagnosis led her and her husband Leon to found the Melanoma Research Alliance, now the largest private funder of melanoma research.

Eli and Edythe Broad gave $100 million in 2004 to start the Broad Institute and kept giving until their total passed $700 million in 2013; the genomics it produced underpins much of precision oncology.

In 2014 the Columbia Sportswear chairwoman gave $100 million to OHSU's Knight Cancer Institute, the largest single contribution toward matching Phil and Penny Knight's $500 million challenge.

His Goh Foundation's $50 million gift built the Goh Cheng Liang Proton Therapy Centre at the National Cancer Centre Singapore, the only public proton therapy service in the country.

The cancer centre at UCSF carries her name, and in 2017 the Helen Diller Foundation gave UCSF $500 million, the largest gift in its history, bringing the family's total there to $650 million.

Herbert and Florence Irving's gifts to Columbia began with $8.5 million in 1987, founded its cancer centre in 1995 and ended with a $700 million bequest in 2017 for cancer research; the total passed $900 million.

In 1936 he donated the land on York Avenue to which Memorial Hospital moved; Memorial Sloan Kettering has been there ever since.

In 1884 he and his wife Charlotte were among the group who founded New York Cancer Hospital, the institution that became Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

A chemicals billionaire treated for cancer several times, he and his wife Karen founded Huntsman Cancer Institute in 1995 and their family gave more than $400 million to build its research institute and hospital.

In 2016 he founded an institute in Los Angeles to reimagine cancer care, and his Ellison Institute of Technology is building an Oxford campus with a £130 million alliance with the university.

After his wife Debra's melanoma diagnosis in 2007 the couple founded the Melanoma Research Alliance, which has put more than $200 million into research while they pay its running costs so every donated dollar goes to science.

In 1997 he and his wife Madlyn, a cancer survivor, gave the University of Pennsylvania the gift that created the Abramson Cancer Center, where CAR-T therapy was later developed.

Since 1980 he has put more than HK$30 billion into his foundation; its Heart of Gold programme gave free hospice care to tens of thousands of poor terminal cancer patients, and its gift built the Cambridge centre that houses Cancer Research UK's institute there.

In the late 1970s the owner of Calumet Farm approved a $1 million gift, the first of many, and in 1983 the Lucille Parker Markey Cancer Center was founded in her name in Lexington.

Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 1998 at 51, he set up a foundation that awarded ten $100,000 grants in its first year and became the largest private funder of pancreatic cancer research; he died in 1999.

In 1999 the Ingram family made what Vanderbilt calls a transformational gift in honour of the late E. Bronson Ingram; the centre took the family's name and became Tennessee's leading cancer research centre.

In 2016 his $50 million, matched by Sidney Kimmel and others to $125 million, launched a Johns Hopkins institute that put more than a hundred scientists and clinicians to work on cancer immunotherapy.

Diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer in 1993, the financier founded the Prostate Cancer Foundation, whose grants helped pay for the science behind abiraterone and enzalutamide and built a network of precision oncology centres for US veterans.

He never saw the hospital: his foundation, left $19 million on his death in 1939, matched the State of Texas's $500,000 in 1941 on condition the new cancer hospital be built in Houston and carry his name.

His 2006 pledge of $100 million, then the largest individual commitment in MSK's history, built a 23-storey laboratory tower that nearly doubled the centre's research space.

Phil and Penny Knight gave OHSU $100 million in 2008, a $500 million challenge in 2013 that Oregon met within two years, and $2 billion in 2025, described by OHSU as the largest gift to a US university.

She and Mark Zuckerberg founded the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub with the stated mission to cure or prevent all disease; its programmes include engineering the immune system to detect cancer and other diseases early.

Under his chairmanship Tata Trusts launched a cancer care programme in 2017 to bring affordable treatment closer to home: 20 hospitals across seven states and, with the Assam government, a three-level network of 19 cancer facilities across the north-east.

Richard and Susan Rogel's 2018 gift to the University of Michigan renamed its NCI-designated comprehensive cancer centre, founded in 1986, the Rogel Cancer Center.

After his mother Emily Winship Woodruff died of cancer in 1937, he gave Emory University the gift that founded the Winship Clinic; his foundation's $400 million gift in 2018 is building Winship's new Midtown Atlanta home.

In May 2025 the Weill Family Foundation's $100 million challenge launched a $200 million, ten-year cancer research partnership between UCSF and Stanford, the two big Bay Area cancer centres that usually compete.

In 2016 he founded and funded an institute that runs cancer immunotherapy research as one network across a dozen leading cancer centres, sharing data, samples and patents rather than competing for them.

The former Paramount chief co-founded Stand Up To Cancer, whose televised specials and Dream Teams have pledged over $800 million to collaborative research that fed into several approved cancer drugs.

The Jones Apparel founder has given $157 million to Johns Hopkins since 2001, which named its cancer centre for him, and put $50 million into the Bloomberg~Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy in 2016.

Britain's most decorated Olympic cyclist made his stage 4 prostate cancer public in 2024 and founded Tour de 4, a mass ride that shows people can live well with advanced cancer and has raised more than £2.7 million for cancer charities.

After his wife Meherbai's illness and death in 1931 he founded the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust in 1932 and left it everything he had; the Trust built Tata Memorial in 1941, called the first large contribution of India to the international fight against cancer.

From the 1940s until his last clinic visit in 1999 the greatest hitter in baseball raised money for Dana-Farber's Jimmy Fund and visited children on the wards on condition that no one wrote about it.

When his friend Damon Runyon died of throat cancer in 1946 he asked his radio audience for a penny, a nickel, a dime or a dollar; the fund he started has invested over $490 million and backed more than 4,000 scientists.