Five years ago, Bill Ackman said it would have been too hard to lure top scientists away from universities. Now, he thinks the balance of power has shifted.
The billionaire investor and his wife, designer and entrepreneur Neri Oxman, are launching a new Manhattan neuroscience and longevity center called the Ackman Oxman Institute, or AOI. Ackman said in a lengthy Aug. 19 post on X that the couple is donating roughly $400 million in Pershing Square stock to anchor the institute, with another gift of a similar or potentially greater size to come.
“Our goal is to build the world’s greatest brain research, rehabilitation, recovery, human optimization, and longevity institute,” Ackman wrote.
The project is partly a bet on brain science, but also one that traditional universities have become more vulnerable in the competition for elite researchers.
Ackman said he and Oxman considered creating a brain institute half a decade ago, inspired in part by Oxman’s mother, who died from Alzheimer’s. They decided against it because New York real estate was too expensive and they believed it would be “too difficult to recruit the best talent from universities to our effort,” Ackman wrote.
But he said the equation has changed. The real estate needed for the project became available at a 70% discount. Universities, meanwhile, have become “a much less attractive place to work,” he wrote, citing campus politics, antisemitism and declining funding.
That claim fits into Ackman’s broader fight with elite universities. He helped lead the pressure campaign against former Harvard president Claudine Gay, criticized the university’s handling of antisemitism, attacked its DEI policies and later called for the ousting of several Harvard board members.
Ackman’s post didn’t mention data points about scientists leaving universities en masse. But his new institute is being structured around the idea that top researchers can be persuaded to leave, or at least work outside, the traditional university system.
AOI will be “patient-centric” and explicitly focused on turning scientific discoveries into treatments, Ackman wrote. It will not be an academic institute that produces “lots of papers” but “little if any results for patients.” Instead, its mandate will be to speed the path from research to cures, treatments and devices.
“If you are going to have a devastating brain injury, now is the best time in history for that to happen,” Ackman wrote. “We are living in a world when you can be confident that the blind will soon see again. We are going to do everything we can to help make that happen, including by assisting existing companies in the space.”
Though AOI will be a nonprofit, Ackman explained it will have “highly commercial instincts.” The institute plans to run its own venture funding operation, create and seed companies around technologies developed there, and reinvest the financial returns into further research.
The project also has a sizable physical footprint. Ackman said the Pershing Square Foundation acquired a nearly vacant, 400,000-square-foot biotech facility on Manhattan’s West Side after a real estate colleague alerted him to the property in May. The foundation also has an adjoining 130,000-square-foot building under contract and is acquiring a neighboring vacant lot.
With additional construction permitted under current zoning, Ackman said the campus could reach 680,000 square feet—larger than Rockefeller University’s laboratory footprint.
The institute will combine neuroscience, rehabilitation, nutrition, clinical trials and longevity research onto the same campus. Ackman also wants AOI to work across institutional boundaries, with Mount Sinai as an important partner but not its only collaborator.
“We don’t believe any institution has a monopoly on the best ideas or the best talent,” he wrote.
Inspiration for the institute
The project grew out of a family crisis. His 26-year-old daughter Lucy had a brain hemorrhage and underwent emergency surgery after being found unconscious in her Brooklyn apartment. Ackman wrote in the X post that months of treatment and rehabilitation convinced his family of both the brain’s ability to recover and the limits of existing treatment.
“The interesting thing is that everything I’ve done in my life up till now has prepared me to help her,” he previously told Fortune, explaining that he had to exhort the doctors to try novel treatments like injecting mitochondria into Lucy’s eye to help preserve her sight. AOI will build off the insights gained from her treatment, he said.
Ackman also sees AI and brain-computer interfaces as key to AOI’s mission, writing that Lucy might need brain-computer support that’s being developed at companies like Neuralink, Precision Neuroscience and Synchron. He argued his new institute should be “at the forefront of the interplay between the brain and AI.”
AOI has already identified a CEO whom Ackman expects to announce by October, and it is searching for a chief scientific officer, chief AI and technology officer and other senior leaders. He said the board includes inventor Dean Kamen (whom he described as ”our generation’s Thomas Edison”), Regeneron co-founder and chief scientific officer George Yancopoulos, Nobel Prize-winning biochemist James Rothman, neuroscientist Bernardo Sabatini, neurosurgeon Chris Kellner, Pershing Square Foundation CEO Olivia Flatto, Oxman and Ackman himself.
“We have learned from Lucy that the brain can recover from even catastrophic injury,” he wrote. “There is so much more work to be done as the mind is a terrible thing to waste.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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