New York billionaire Bill Ackman, known for his contrarian Wall Street bets, has just embarked on a very different sort of venture: Building a major research center on Manhattan’s Upper West Side dedicated to understanding the brain. The project, which was inspired by a recent family ordeal, will be housed in a 400,000-square-foot building at 125 West End Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that Ackman’s Pershing Square Foundation purchased this week for $190 million.
The foundation also signed a contract to buy an adjoining building at 320 West 66th Street for $70 million that, along with his purchase of additional development rights, means the total facility could span nearly 700,000 square feet upon completion.
Currently, the structure on West End Avenue houses a life sciences and research campus known as West End Labs. In time, it will become the Ackman Oxman Institute, named for the billionaire and his wife Neri Oxman, and bring together experts who will undertake a comprehensive study of the brain—focusing on everything from rehab to longevity to nutrition, according to Ackman.
As Ackman shared in a new Fortune magazine profile, the decision to build the new institute came after a painful personal experience in February. That’s when his 26-year-old daughter, Lucy, suffered a brain hemorrhage, and was found lying alone on the floor of her apartment 15 hours later.
Ordinarily, such an injury would be terminal given the amount of pressure on the brain for such a prolonged period of time, Ackman told me, so her survival felt like a miracle. She has lost her voice and most of her sight, he said, but is improving significantly.
Her survival was due in part to Ackman exhorting her doctors to attempt a series of cutting edge, experimental treatments, he said—including injecting mitochondria into her eye in order to preserve a portion of her sight after her optic nerve had been crushed.
“Lucy was a test case,” said Ackman, adding that the new center will build on insights garnered from his daughter’s treatments, and serve as a springboard for much broader advances in how to understand and care for the brain. The center, he said, will bring together researchers who focus on everything from genetics to nutrition to longevity, and will include facilities to carry out neurosurgery operations.
Ackman said he and Oxman had been contemplating a major philanthropic endeavor related to brain research after they lost Oxman’s mother to Alzheimer’s five years ago. At the time, they eyed the 125 West End site, but the price for the real estate and staffing an institute was too high. Since then, though, a slump in the life science sector and a growing willingness of scientists to leave academia made the plan viable, he explained. Ackman closed the deal on Tuesday morning.
The funding for the project will come from the Ackman-led Pershing Square Philanthropies, which has spent more than a billion to date on grants and investments. If the new center builds out the additional development rights, the size of the Ackman Oxman Institute could eclipse the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and other significant health research facilities in New York City.
The Ackman Oxman Institute’s board includes Nobel Prize cell researcher Jim Rothman and Andrew Huberman, the Stanford University neuroscientist and the host of the wildly popular podcast Huberman Lab. The board is working on hiring the organization’s first CEO, Ackman said. He added that he expects it to begin operations in the main building by the end of the year, and that future funding will come in part from an eco-system of startups and venture capital attached to the institute.
Ackman is famous as an outsize personality on Wall Street, where he has made massive investments in companies such as Chipotle and sought (unsuccessfully) to take down the stock of Herbalife, which was backed by his arch-rival Carl Icahn. He has also become an iconoclastic figure in politics and culture, marshaling his huge social media following for causes ranging from ousting Harvard’s president over campus protests to criticizing New York City’s Democratic Socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani.
But he views the new brain institute, which he will develop in partnership with Mount Sinai hospital, where doctors saved his daughter, as the biggest endeavor of his career.
“The interesting thing is that everything I’ve done in my life up till now has prepared me to help her,” he told me. “All the philanthropic stuff, the interest in science, the fact that we met all these brain science people during COVID. We partnered with Mount Sinai, built a saliva-based testing lab … So when we had an emergency, I knew who to call.”