PHILADELPHIA — Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie and his family have donated $50 million to accelerate research into autism by creating a dedicated center to study its causes and treatment options at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn Medicine, the two nonprofits announced this week.

Penn and CHOP said the Luries’ gift is the largest ever for academic medical centers with a singular focus on autism at all ages. There have been large gifts in neuroscience covering a wider range of conditions.

The Lurie Autism Institute aims to build on the autism research already being done at the two institutions, and draw to the field additional researchers and funding, Lurie said in an interview.

He called the neurological condition “one of the most complex scientific and public health challenges of our time.”

“We’re clearly at a moment in time when breakthroughs in neuroscience and genetics and AI and imaging are opening up entirely new possibilities that we’ve never had before,” Lurie said.

Lurie described the creation of the institute as part of the natural evolution of his family’s longtime philanthropic support for the autism community — an effort inspired by Lurie’s brother, who is on the autism spectrum disorder.

Lurie’s mother founded the Nancy Lurie Marks Family Foundation in 1977 to help people with autism lead fulfilling and rewarding lives, according to its website.

Jeffrey Lurie founded the Eagles Autism Foundation in 2018.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 1 of 31 children and 1 of 45 adults in the U.S. have autism. The disorder can present along a wide spectrum, including people with severe intellectual disability and others who are gifted intellectually in certain areas but challenged by social interactions.

Why Jeffrey Lurie picked Penn Medicine and CHOP

The Lurie family and other funders have been sponsoring autism research for decades, but felt the research was too dispersed to have a significant impact on the autism puzzle, Lurie said.

He went looking through the United States and in Europe for what he called a “scientific epicenter” with enough heft to make a difference in autism research. He found what he was looking for in University City.

Combined, Penn and CHOP have 47 autism spectrum disorder research teams led by faculty members working under 120 National Institutes for Health grants, the two institutions said.

“Penn and CHOP happened to have already excellent labs and efforts and scientists in autism research and related areas and a joint campus,” Lurie said.

It was almost a coincidence that both medical centers happened to be where his football team is based and where he lives, he said. Penn and CHOP convinced him over a couple of years that their combined efforts “would have the best chance of really significant success and more rapid discovery.”

A track record of successful scientific collaboration between Penn and CHOP — two independent nonprofits whose collaborations most recently include the first personalized, CRISPR-based gene-editing therapy for rare metabolic diseases — is important to Lurie because he wants researchers to examine the entire lifespan of people with autism.

“The behaviors and the difficulties that autistic people endure evolve over their entire lifespan,” Lurie said. For example, he noted that some people with autism speak early in their lives, but then lose that ability as they age. That’s an area ripe for research, he said.

Lurie hopes to see the institute turn into a global hub with a large budget “that is really there for those that are frustrated with the lack of progress over the last decades,” he said.

Penn and CHOP will launch an international search to hire the institute’s founding director.

What the Lurie Autism Institute means for Penn and CHOP

The $50 million Lurie gift adds to the philanthropic news at the two institutions this year. Penn announced a $120 million gift in February from Catherine and Anthony Clifton and renamed its newest patient pavilion in Philadelphia the Clifton Center for Medical Breakthroughs.

A month later, CHOP said Catherine Clifton’s brother, Comcast Corp. CEO Brian Roberts, and his wife Aileen, were giving it $125 million will get their name on the nonprofit’s new $2.59 billion patient tower that is expected to open in late 2028.

The center has named as interim director Daniel Rader, who is a Penn faculty member and physician focused on genomic and personalized medicine.

Penn and CHOP already have dozens of labs working on discrete projects involving autism. “What a gift like this does is allow us to really look from above and bring many of these efforts together,” Rader said.

Launching the autism institute with $50 million also presents an opportunity to approach Penn and CHOP investigators who have never thought of working on autism, but have skills that could help advance scientific understanding of the disorder.

Rader expects the Lurie Autism Institute to emphasize the study of environmental exposures, which in combination with a genetic predisposition can lead to autism. The study of this phenomenon is called epigenetics.

“We think that the environmental exposures that predispose to autism in combination with genetics, are very understudied,” he said.

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