On Sept. 26, 2016, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis announced it had received a $10 million gift to support research that harnesses the immune system to fight cancer, infectious diseases, and disorders caused by autoimmunity and immune deficiencies. The gift from Andrew M. and Jane M. Bursky will advance cutting-edge work at the newly named Andrew M. and Jane M. Bursky Center for Human Immunology and Immunotherapy Programs.

Andrew Bursky is co-founder and chief executive officer of Atlas Holdings LLC, an industrial holding company based in Greenwich, Conn. Bursky also serves as chairman of the company, which employs more than 23,000 people worldwide and operates in a variety of industries, including aluminum, automotive, building materials, construction, distribution, energy, paper and packaging. He also serves as a member of the executive boards of the Eisenhower Fellowships and of No Labels, a bipartisan effort to encourage congressional action on key issues facing the nation.

The Burskys have deep connections to Washington University, where Andrew earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics and engineering and Jane earned a bachelor’s degree in French and education.

Long known for its role in fighting infectious disease, the immune system more recently has been implicated in cancer and for its overactive role in autoimmune conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis.

One major initiative supported by the new gift is the expansion of an ongoing effort to preserve blood and tissue from patients with different diseases that display immune system involvement. With patients’ permission, researchers will have access to blood and tissue samples before, during and after treatment in an effort to study a patient’s native immunity and how it might respond to different therapeutic strategies.  Such a resource could help doctors understand the reasons that a specific immune therapy is effective in some patients but not others.