On a Philanthropy Streak, Clara Wu Tsai Looks to Flip the Traditional Health-Research Script

Each year, donors give millions to study individuals whose bodies are failing because of cancer, heart disease, or other illnesses. Yet a relatively new philanthropy player is betting on a different approach, backing research to reverse-engineer health advances by studying humans at their peak — particularly elite athletes like those in Tokyo for the Olympics.

Continuing a yearlong run of big giving, Clara Wu Tsai — a business executive and co-owner of several professional sports franchises — announced Wednesday a 10-year, $220 million commitment that brings together six major institutions to identify fundamentals underlying human performance. The new Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance will pursue what it calls “moonshots” in areas such as tissue regeneration, gene expression, and predictive modeling.

“Science funding is traditionally focused on the study of diseases,” Wu Tsai told the Chronicle. “There really isn’t a lot of funding to study the biological principles behind healthy people.” She pointed to an explosion of new technologies in medicine that, if applied to the study of high-functioning individuals, could yield advances in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, cerebral palsy, and other conditions that cause physical disabilities.

The news is the latest in a string of recent gifts announced by Wu Tsai and her husband, Joe Tsai, a billionaire co-founder of the Alibaba Group, the Chinese tech giant. In May, Tsai, a native of Taiwan, was among a group of business leaders and others who contributed $125 million to help launch the Asian American Foundation following the pandemic-related surge of violence against Asian Americans. The Tsais last year committed $50 million over five years to support social-justice and economic-mobility efforts designed to benefit people of color, particularly in Brooklyn, home to the Nets, the NBA team the couple owns.

Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance

The new alliance broadens the Tsais’ substantial footprint in science. Two neuroscience institutes already bear their names — at Stanford, Wu Tsai’s alma mater, and Yale, where Tsai is an alumnus. The Yale institute, which is a new venture for the university, was just announced in February.

Wu Tsai, who leads the couple’s philanthropy, said their investments in science are her passion. She is the founder of the alliance and spearheaded the effort to determine its framework. Discussions began in the fall of 2019. A few months later, more than a dozen scientists, experts, coaches, and athletes gathered for an intense two-day planning meeting near San Diego to kick things off.

“The idea of exploration and discovery is a major motivating factor in our philanthropy,” she says. “I love knowledge and creating knowledge.”

The six institutions joining the alliance are Boston Children’s Hospital, the University of California at San Diego, the University of Kansas, the University of Oregon, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and Stanford.

Scott Delp, who will lead Stanford’s work in the alliance, is a professor of bioengineering, mechanical engineering, and orthopedic surgery. His research includes the study of the mechanics of human movement with a focus on treatments for individuals with cerebral palsy, osteoarthritis, Parkinson’s disease, and other physical disabilities.

Each institution in the alliance brings specialties critical to driving advances in a field where research is limited, Delp said. “Disease is an extreme” in the human condition, he said. “We’re studying the other extreme.”

Earlier this year, alliance researchers announced that they had found the molecular means to heal skin without scarring — an approach that could help athletes rehabilitate from injury but that could also apply to individuals with liver fibrosis, burns, abdominal adhesions, scleroderma, and scarring to heart tissue after a heart attack.

Delp praised Wu Tsai for funding the research but also “innovation hubs” that will make alliance work public and translate findings for a general audience to put into practice. Funding also includes money set aside for research that arises from discoveries in the initial work.

“We are keeping some of the powder dry so that as there is a new opportunity and a new discovery over this 10-year horizon, we can be nimble and act on that and bring new people into the alliance,” he said.

A Childhood in Academia

Wu Tsai grew up in academia, regularly mixing with scholars. Her father, De-Min Wu, is a renowned econometrician who taught at the University of Kansas for 35 years. She went on to earn a B.A. in international relations and an M.A. in international policy from Stanford as well as an MBA from Harvard.

In her career in business, Wu Tsai has held positions as general manager of the Hong Kong operations of Taobao, China’s largest online shopping website, and as a vice president at American Express in Hong Kong and New York.

She and Tsai, who married in 1996, are in their 50s. They split time between La Jolla, near San Diego, and Hong Kong as well as New York. Recent news reports indicate Tsai recently purchased two full-floor condo apartments in Manhattan for $157 million, though Wu Tsai’s representatives said they could not confirm that. Their foundation, which they established in 2014, focuses on racial justice, economic mobility, the life sciences, and innovation in the arts and culture. “I’m really, really careful about our philanthropy,” said Wu Tsai, who is president of the foundation. “We treat it like investments; we want to make sure there’s going to be a significant impact.”

Joe Tsai’s wealth has swelled in recent years, according to Forbes estimates, from $3.7 billion in 2014 to nearly $11 billion today. In September 2014, Alibaba raised $25 billion through an initial public offering of stock — a record for an IPO.

Sports has long been an interest for the family. In addition to the Nets, the couple owns the WNBA’s New York Liberty as well as professional lacrosse teams in San Diego and Las Vegas. Tsai played lacrosse at Yale and made the lead gift in 2014 to endow the team. Their three children are active in multiple sports; Alex, their oldest, plays lacrosse at Stanford.

Their proximity to top-level athletics spurred their interest in how the body trains for optimal performance, how it heals, and whether scientists from different fields could pool their knowledge to better predict injuries and speed rehabilitation. “Breakthroughs often happen when you put unlikely people together,” Wu Tsai said.