Pushing the frontiers of science and medicine

Photo Credit: Adie Bush
Doctors at work at New York's Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), which in December 2023 received a gift of $400 million from Griffin Catalyst and the David Geffen Foundation to expand and upgrade its research, education, and treatment facilities toward the goal of eradicating cancer.
Scientific advancements are increasingly turning what was once impossible into what is achievable. Griffin Catalyst identifies and invests in early research and timely solutions that have transformational potential to drive progress for current and future generations.

our impact stories

The head of Translational Imaging Biomarkers at Merck operating a machine that synthesizes alpha-synuclein tracers

Pioneering a Breakthrough in Treating Parkinson’s Disease

As researchers work toward a cure for Parkinson’s disease, they have discovered a crucial link between a protein called alpha-synuclein and the debilitating neurodegenerative disease.

Partnering with The Michael J. Fox Foundation, Griffin Catalyst funded a competition which challenged researchers to develop a tool to visualize and trace alpha-synuclein in the living human brain for the first time. The competition’s promising results have catapulted the field forward and have put us on a path to revolutionizing care for millions of Parkinson’s patients around the world.

Saving Lives Through a Daring Medical Breakthrough

When researchers had a daring hypothesis to use the body’s own mitochondria in a new surgical treatment, a Griffin Catalyst gift to Boston Children’s Hospital provided funding to try this novel, potentially life-saving approach.

The early use of this new mitochondrial transplantation technique contributed to doctors’ and researchers’ efforts to save the lives of infants with otherwise fatal heart conditions. Griffin Catalyst’s investment enables partners to develop pioneering treatments long before they are advanced enough to receive federal funding or private investment—having wider ramifications for the field of medicine.

Leveraging Big Data for Scientific Progress

The digital transformation has placed data at the center of just about every industry. Perhaps nowhere is the opportunity more significant, or less realized, than medicine, where big data has the potential to revolutionize our understanding and treatment of disease.

Griffin Catalyst is advancing this effort through the support of Nightingale Open Science and the Open Datasets Initiative, enabling the world’s leading researchers to leverage machine learning and predictive analytics to solve some of medicine’s most important and urgent challenges.

Advancing the Prevention and Treatment of COVID-19

In early 2020, a global pandemic was imminent and the need for action was urgent. Ken Griffin assessed both the scale of the crisis and the scope of the response required to overcome it.

From rapid testing and convalescent plasma therapies to COVID-19 bioresource repositories, funding from Griffin Catalyst delivered critical innovations to help fight the pandemic. Griffin was also instrumental in architecting Operation Warp Speed‘s accelerated vaccine development—delivering safe, effective COVID-19 vaccines in record time and helping to save many millions of lives.

1st

Ever imaging of alpha-synuclein in the living human brain—a critical step toward understanding Parkinson’s

175,000

Now-digitized images that can be leveraged with AI to better identify high-risk breast cancer

150+

Countries to be equipped with preparedness models to better manage future pandemics

Cardiologists at Boston Children’s Hospital performing a mitochondrial transplant
Dr. Jesse Esch, at right, with Brian Quinn, a cardiology fellow, performing a mitochondrial transplant at Boston Children's Hospital on May 25, 2018.

I’m okay with people tearing apart everything they’ve ever done and replacing it with what is better, what is relevant, what will create the success we need for the next decade.

Ken Griffin Founder, Griffin Catalyst
Dr. Jesse Esch, at right, with Brian Quinn, a cardiology fellow, performing a mitochondrial transplant at Boston Children's Hospital on May 25, 2018.

Featured Partners

Our partner organizations are doing vital work in science and medicine. We’re proud to support them.

In Brief

September 8, 2023
In 2022, Griffin Catalyst joined with partners to support the Organs Initiative, a coalition leveraging data to drive change with broad bipartisan support. The challenge: To fix a broken, inefficient organ donation system that leads to tens of thousands of healthy organs going unrecovered each year and contributes to 30 Americans dying every day for lack of an available organ. In August 2022, the group achieved the first major overhaul of the organ donation system in 40 years, projected to save over 7,000 lives annually. Almost a year later, in July 2023, Congress unanimously passed legislation to break up
October 28, 2024
Griffin Catalyst provided a seed gift of $2.5 million to accelerate the efforts of Feng Zhang, a faculty member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, to develop “programmable therapeutics,” an approach that holds promise for revolutionizing medicine by reprogramming cells to cure a wide range of human diseases.
August 30, 2024
Since 2023, Griffin Catalyst has made transformative gifts to major health care institutions in Miami. Taken together, the support, totaling $150 million, represents an investment in the future of medical care and research in South Florida, allowing these institutions to recruit some of the best health-care professionals in the country, and propelling the region’s future.
June 10, 2026
Griffin Catalyst is supporting scientific innovation through a novel approach known as Focused Research Organizations (FROs). These initiatives take on high-risk, high-potential challenges in science that academic research groups and for-profit companies aren’t well-suited to solving—with a well-defined goal and a time-limited opportunity to make progress. Griffin’s $20 million in support of this model has helped propel two initial FROs—Parallel Squared Technology Institute and Forest Neurotech—to advance work with the potential to address a range of neurological and age-related diseases. Inspired in part by the promise of this approach, the National Science Foundation recently announced a new Tech Labs Initiative,
May 12, 2026
For the first time in recorded history, in recent years, avian flu reached Antarctica, threatening animals in an already fragile ecosystem. Griffin Catalyst responded proactively to this potential crisis—which, gone unchecked, had the potential to devastate Antarctica’s penguin, seal, and seabird populations, with global consequences. By supporting a new scientific monitoring and surveillance effort led by researchers at Cornell University, Griffin Catalyst helped scientists understand the nature and spread of the new virus and what immunity looks like for previously infected animals, with important implications for mitigation strategies and poultry, fishing, and tourism policies that may reduce its spread.
November 12, 2025
The health of one of America’s greatest and best-known watersheds, the Florida Everglades, has been under increasing threat in recent years from agricultural needs and the development demands of the fast-growing population of South Florida. Griffin Catalyst’s support for The Everglades Foundation—a three-decade-old nonprofit organization that helps to protect and restore the immense but fragile ecosystem—is allowing the group to expand its scientific team and resources in order to provide data-driven policy recommendations to the state and federal agencies that are leading the Everglades’ multiyear, multibillion-dollar restoration effort.
September 4, 2025
A three-year gift to the University of Chicago’s Education Lab has brought an innovative, high-dosage, math tutoring initiative to middle schools in Miami-Dade County in an effort to support and accelerate student learning in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Initial results from the program, which started in spring 2024, are promising, suggesting that this approach can help tackle learning loss and enable students to catch up to grade level.
June 17, 2025
How did the end of the Age of Dinosaurs in Africa impact world history? That’s what researchers aim to uncover during a five-year project of excavation and analysis in the Northern Cape region of South Africa. Their study will explore fossil ecosystems and the biodiversity of sub-Saharan Africa during the Late Cretaceous Period to dramatically expand scientists’ currently limited understanding of this important epoch.
April 17, 2025
Griffin Catalyst is proud to partner with the nonprofit American History Unbound. The collaboration will present dramatic multimedia storytelling about World War I and World War II to audiences in New York and Miami, and nationwide through a documentary being filmed for broadcast on public television later this year, to coincide with Veterans Day. The unique combination of narration and imagery from renowned historian John Monsky, accompanied by music from Broadway stars and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, brings to life in new ways two of the most pivotal events in the 20th century.

WHAT’S NEW