$50M donation to buoy cancer research, Indiana

Jeff Swiatek

A $50 million donation to the Indiana University Cancer Center from shopping-mall magnate Mel Simon and his wife, Bren Simon, will fund new research by luring prominent scientists to Indianapolis.

The gift, announced Monday, is the largest ever given to the cancer center and one of the largest ever to a cancer research program in the nation.

"It's a spectacular day for IU Cancer Center," said its director, Dr. Stephen D. Williams.

Part of the donation, to be given over an unspecified number of years, will help the center recruit five to 10 new cancer researchers over the next three years and do much-needed work in cancer prevention, Williams said.

Half of the grant will go toward paying for a $150 million expansion of the center that will add lab space and 60 patient beds by early 2009.

"It's enormously helpful for us," Williams said of the donation.

The center, on the campus of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, immediately will be renamed the Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Cancer Center.

The gift, which surprised many of the 168 researchers at the center, is the largest ever made by the Simons, Bren Simon said.

Mel Simon is co-chairman of Simon Property Group, the nation's largest shopping center development company, which he co-founded in Indianapolis. He also is a co-owner, with his brother Herb, of the NBA's Indiana Pacers basketball team.

Mel and Bren Simon have made a string of donations to IU over the past 15 years. The cancer center grant arose from conversations about how to make a new donation with significant impact on Indiana, Bren Simon said in a telephone interview.

"This sounds so basic, but when you have been able to be blessed the way the Simon family has been blessed in so many ways, I think it's an obligation to give back, to change the world, to make it a better place," she said.

Rather than donate quietly as they often have in the past, the Simons and IU agreed to bring attention to the cancer center gift. "It's to honor my husband, his accomplishments," Bren Simon said.

The Simons have donated more than $100 million in Indiana, both personally and through several groups they control, including the Pacer Foundation, she said.

The family's gifts to IU include the Bess Meshulam Simon Music Library and Recital Center, the Helene G. Simon Hillel Center and Simon Hall, the new home of life sciences on the Bloomington main campus.

The cancer center grant comes as new research identifies better ways to attack cancers or prevent them from spreading.

For IU cancer specialist Dr. Lawrence Einhorn, the money could help speed up the process of unlocking the riddles of cancer.

"Cancer is so complicated and so expensive," Einhorn said. "You can't throw money at a problem like cancer and expect it to disappear. It doesn't work that way."

But what the donation will do, he said, is help IU cancer researchers follow many more leads in their daily research, rather than hedging their bets on one or two leads.

IU officials will use half the grant money to establish an endowment, named for the Simons' late son, Joshua Max Simon, to recruit and retain internationally known scientists.

The endowment should produce about $1.5 million a year in interest income for recruitment purposes, said Curt Simic, president of the IU Foundation.

That money will be used to attract promising cancer scientists by offering to pay for their staffs and lab equipment and materials if they come to IU, Williams said.

"This gift really helps a lot. It'll help us attract some of those superstars," Simic said. "If we could find two or three Larry Einhorns, what an impact that would have."

Besides its expertise in testicular cancer, the IU center specializes in breast and lung cancers and cancers in children. Some of the Simon money could be spent to boost research in cancer prevention, Williams said.

Ellen Sigal, chair of Friends of Cancer Research, a nonprofit organization that raises awareness about cancer research, lauded the Simons for their donation.

Sigal said private giving is "very significant" in paying for cancer research.

"It's huge and essential. Right now at this point, we have close to a crisis in funding for cancer research. Government funding is decreasing for the first time in 30 years."

The rest of the donation will help pay for the expansion to the cancer center, in part by paying off the bonds on the project earlier, Simic said.

"We've been working like the dickens to find money" from private donors to help pay for the expansion, the foundation chief said. "I've been sort of under the gun to find this money."

The expansion will give the center more room for research by adding 125,000 square feet of lab space by early 2009.

IU's board had agreed to give naming rights to whoever made a donation of at least $50 million to the center, Simic said. The Simons had to be talked into putting their names on the building, he said.

"They were not looking for a place to put their name. They have plenty of opportunities for that," he said.

Simic called the donation "the most generous" he's helped land at IU.

"Having this great philanthropic family aligned with IU is a great thing," Simic said. "This family is really the Lillys of our time. It's one of the great philanthropic families of this state and of this time."

IU President Adam W. Herbert said in a statement that the Simon donation "will have a major impact on the lives of Hoosier families for generations to come."

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