GREAT IDEAS START SMALL
Going All In Conrad Prebys has a personal motto displayed on a sign in his office: “Nothing is impossible.” If he believes that a new idea will someday pay off big, he goes all in. That’s why he has given $100 million, his largest philanthropic gift ever, to help the recently renamed Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute implement its 10-year strategic vision.
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PORTAL | www.SBPdiscovery.org
Prebys, who is an honorary trustee, first invested in Institute research in 2009 with a $10-million gift to support the Conrad Prebys Center for Chemical Genomics, an ultra-highthroughput chemical screening center with industrial-scale drug discovery capabilities. That gift, used to establish the technology infrastructure upon which the Institute’s future direction is based, has already begun to pay off. Said Michael Jackson, Ph.D., vice president of drug discovery and development, “Six years ago, Conrad bet on an operation that today is at the forefront of doing drug discovery in the not-for-profit world, where we have actually moved and changed the ecosystem by which drugs are discovered.” Prebys, who has been named by The Chronicle of Philanthropy as one of the “25 Most Generous People in America,” is a benefactor to a range of causes, including the arts and higher education. But he has a special passion for biomedical research. Surviving a near-fatal childhood illness and a late-life bout with cancer taught Prebys that health is the greatest human treasure. And as an entrepreneurial philanthropist, he shares the faith basic scientists have that their research will produce ripple effects spreading across different disease areas. For instance, the Prebys Center’s compound screening infrastructure equipped the Institute for a pivotal role in the 2015 San Diego Dementia Drug Discovery Program—Collaboration 4 Cure (C4C), a regional initiative to accelerate cures for Alzheimer’s disease. And the center has expanded the potential impact of SBP basic research by giving its scientists a disease-agnostic platform for translating