American philanthropists and entrepreneurs Eli and Edythe Broad are investing an additional $100 million into the Broad Instituteto launch a new decade of transformative work to harness recent biomedical discoveries to benefit patients.

This gift brings their total contributions to the institute to $700 million since its founding nearly a decade ago and makes the Broads the second largest donors ever to a university, hospital or research institute for biomedical research.

“When we made our first investment to create the Broad Institute, we shared Eric Lander’s vision that discoveries in biomedical research held the key to beating devastating disease and improving people’s lives,” said Eli Broad, founder of The Broad Foundations. “As the Broad Institute nears its tenth anniversary, it has already made transformative discoveries, building on the successes of the Human Genome Project. Our latest investment is intended to catalyze the next decade of innovation and discovery. Our goal is to enable the Broad Institute community to continue to take bold risks, bring together the brightest minds in the field and pursue game-changing breakthroughs that are needed to make a difference in science and medicine.”

The Broad Institute was founded in 2003, bringing together scientists from across the MIT and Harvard communities, including the Harvard-affiliated teaching hospitals, and from diverse disciplines including biology, medicine, chemistry and computer science.

Through collaborations that span the Broad Institute’s partner institutions and other organizations across the globe, the Broad has pioneered scientific advances aimed at developing a deeper, more precise understanding of disease biology and opening up entirely new paradigms for diagnosis and treatment. These approaches include discovering the genes and molecular underpinnings of major human diseases ranging from diabetes to cancer to infectious disease;

applying this knowledge to systematically map the “wiring diagram” of cell control, revealing the key vulnerabilities that underlie disease; and discovering and developing diverse chemical compounds that can target those vulnerabilities.

Broad researchers have developed and applied state-of-the-art genomic methods, which have propelled the discovery of hundreds of genes at play in major human diseases, including type 2 diabetes and early-onset heart disease; psychiatric diseases such as autism and schizophrenia; autoimmune diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease and rheumatoid arthritis; infectious diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis; and dozens of cancers.

The Broads’ $100 million gift is their fourth gift to the Broad Institute. In 2004, an initial $100 million investment launched the institute, and was followed a year later by a second $100 million. In 2008, the Broads pledged $400 million to endow and establish the Broad Institute as an independent nonprofit scientific research institution, making it a permanent part of the biomedical landscape.