The reincarnation of a shuttered Los Angeles retail hotspot into a sprawling UCLA research center has received a major boost from billionaire philanthropist Dr. Gary Michelson and his wife, Alya, who will donate $120 million dollars to accelerate the project.
Michelson, a spinal surgeon and inventor, said the money would help launch the California Institute of Immunology and Immunotherapy, which aims to create breakthrough discoveries that prevent and cure diseases like such as cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer’s disease.
The institute will be a tenant in the UCLA Research Park, which is under construction in the former Westside Pavilion. The indoor mall located 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 in 2019.
The mall was in the process of being converted into offices when the UC Regents I 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 medical programs.
By purchasing the old mall, UCLA saved years of labor to build such a facility on its campus, which is the smallest of UC’s nine undergraduate campuses and has very little room for growth.
View of the courtyard of the UCLA Research Center, currently under construction in the former Westside Pavilion shopping center.
(Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)
“This building would have sat on the last available land on the UCLA campus,” Michelson said, “and it would have been extremely expensive to construct. In terms of real estate, it was simply an extraordinary opportunity.
The Immunology Institute had been planned for years, while a large-scale research park was something “we always dreamed of having… but we always recognized that we could never find a property that large close to campus. We had kind of abandoned the idea many years ago — and it became a reality,” said former UCLA Chancellor Gene Block, who was instrumental in purchasing the former Westside Pavilion.
A previous plan to build the institute on campus called for demolishing a parking lot, digging a hole deep enough to replace the parking lot and erecting a new building on top, Block said.
The gift, through Michelson Medical Research Foundationdevotes $100 million to the creation of two research entities within the institute, each funded to the tune of $50 million; one will focus on rapid vaccine development and the other on harnessing the body’s microbiome to advance human health. Microbiome research will be conducted in collaboration with the new UCLA Goodman-Luskin Microbiome Centerplacing it among the largest microbiome research companies in the world, the foundation said.
The foundation also funds a $20 million endowment to provide research grants to young scientists using new processes to advance immunotherapy research, human immunology and vaccine discovery.
The institute will have laboratories of different sizes aimed at biotechnology researchers who can start with small teams which can grow into larger laboratories if successful.
“We’re going to create a whole ecosystem of biotech startups and they’re going to stay here” and attract other players to the neighborhood, Michelson said. “We’re going to build a whole biotech ecosystem throughout Westwood.”
He envisages that 5,000 people, including 500 scientific researchers, would work in the institute. Gov. Gavin Newsom estimated in January that it would take more than three years to completely transform the 700,000-square-foot complex, but Michelson hopes to have much of the immunology institute operating in half that time, he declared. Covering 360,000 square feet, the institute will be the main tenant of the research park.
The former mall’s 12-screen multiplex movie theater could be transformed into conference rooms or performance spaces offering programming in the arts, humanities, sciences and social sciences, the office said of the chancellor.
An interior view of the UCLA Research Center currently under construction in the former Westside Pavilion shopping center.
(Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)
This is the Michelsons’ largest gift in 30 years of philanthropy. It includes $50 million for the construction of Michelson Hall at the University of Southern California, which houses the Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience. Michelson’s name won’t be attached to the new UCLA complex, he said, because other philanthropists — perhaps one who gives more than he does — might want that recognition.
“This gift will change countless lives here and around the world,” said Darnell Hunt, interim chancellor of UCLA.
The institute will operate as a nonprofit medical research organization, funded by a public-private partnership and governed by an independent board of directors including representatives from UCLA, according to a UC Regents document. The institute will pay UCLA 7.5 percent of net revenues generated from the sale of new drugs and other inventions created by its scientists, the document states.
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 by the Los Angeles public university system in less than two years.
Looking to expand its presence, UCLA announced in June 2023 that it had acquired the Art Deco-style Trust Building in downtown Los Angeles and renamed it UCLA Downtown.
Nine months earlier, the school spent $80 million to purchase two other major properties owned by Marymount California University, a small Catholic university that closed its doors 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.
