Major gift accelerates plans for UCLA medical research hub

The reincarnation of a shuttered Los Angeles retail mecca as a sprawling UCLA research center has received a major boost from billionaire philanthropist Dr. Gary Michelson and his wife, Alya, who will give $120 million to ramp up the project.

Michelson, a spine surgeon and inventor, said the money will help launch the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy, which aims to create breakthrough discoveries that prevent and cure diseases including cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer’s.

The institute will be a tenant in UCLA Research Park, which is under construction in the former Westside Pavilion. The indoor mall two miles south of the university at Pico and Westwood boulevards was a 1980s icon popular with shoppers and filmmakers before falling out of favor. Most of its stores closed by 2019.

The shopping center was being converted to offices when the UC Regents bought it for $700 million in January to create the research park. Along with the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy, it will house the UCLA Center for Quantum Science and Engineering, as well as other science and medicine programs.

By purchasing the former shopping center, UCLA saved years of toil to build such a facility on its campus, which is the smallest of the nine UC undergraduate campuses and has very little room for growth.

A courtyard view of the UCLA research center now under construction in the former Westside Pavilion shopping center.

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

“That building would have gone on the last available piece of property on the UCLA campus,” Michelson said, “and it would have been extraordinarily expensive to build there. As a real estate matter, this was just an extraordinary opportunity.”

The immunology institute had been planned for years, while a full-scale research park was something “we’ve always dreamed of having … but we always recognized we could never find a piece of property that big close to campus. We had sort of given up on the idea many years ago — and it came alive,” said former UCLA Chancellor Gene Block, who was instrumental in the purchase of the former Westside Pavilion.

An earlier plan to build the institute on the campus called for tearing down a parking garage, digging a hole deep enough to replace the parking and erecting a new building on top, Block said.

The gift, through the Michelson Medical Research Foundation, designates $100 million to establish two research entities within the institute, each funded with $50 million; one will focus on rapid vaccine development and the other on harnessing the body’s microbiome to advance human health. The microbiome research will be conducted in collaboration with the new UCLA Goodman-Luskin Microbiome Center, placing it among the largest microbiome research enterprises in the world, the foundation said.

The foundation is also funding a $20-million endowment to provide research grants to young scientists using novel processes to advance immunotherapy research, human immunology and vaccine discovery.

The institute have labs of different sizes meant to serve biotech researchers who can start with small teams that can grow into larger labs if they find success.

“We’re going to create an entire ecosystem of biotech startups and they’re going to stay right here” and attract other players to the neighborhood, Michelson said. “We’re going to build out an entire ecosystem of biotech all through Westwood.”

He envisions 5,000 people, including 500 research scientists, working in the institute. Gov. Gavin Newsom estimated in January that it would take more than three years to fully transform the 700,000-square-foot complex, but Michelson hopes to have a large portion of the immunology institute operating in half that time, he said. At 360,000 square feet, the institute will be the research park’s primary tenant.

The former mall’s 12-screen multiplex movie theater may be converted into lecture halls or performance spaces offering programming across the arts, humanities, sciences and social sciences, the chancellor’s office said.

An interior view of the UCLA research center now under construction in the former Westside Pavilion shopping center.

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

The gift is the Michelsons’ largest single donation in 30 years of philanthropy that includes $50 million to build Michelson Hall at the University of Southern California, which is home to the Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience. The Michelson name will not be attached to the new UCLA complex, he said, because other philanthropists — perhaps one who donates more than he did — may want the recognition.

“The gift will change countless lives here and across the globe,” UCLA interim Chancellor Darnell Hunt said.

The institute will operate as a nonprofit medical research organization funded by a public-private partnership and governed by an independent board that includes UCLA representatives, according to a UC Regents document. The institute will pay UCLA 7.5% of the net revenues generated by the sale of new medicines and other inventions its scientists create, the document said.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said the project “has the potential to fundamentally change health outcomes around the world and create good jobs in Los Angeles.”

The purchase of the former Westside Pavilion marked the third major acquisition for the public university system in Los Angeles in less than two years.

Seeking to expand its footprint, UCLA announced in June 2023 it had acquired the Art Deco-style Trust Building in downtown Los Angeles and renamed it UCLA Downtown.

Nine months prior, the school spent $80 million to buy two other major properties owned by Marymount California University, a small Catholic university that was shuttered last year. The purchase included Marymount’s 24.5-acre campus in Rancho Palos Verdes and an 11-acre residential site in nearby San Pedro.