The rockefeller university

About the Weill Cancer Hub East

The Weill Cancer Hub East is a pioneering research collaboration uniting Rockefeller University, Princeton University, and Weill Cornell Medicine to accelerate discoveries that address clinical unmet needs for patients with cancer. Established in 2025, the Hub brings together world-class scientists to investigate how nutrition, metabolism, and the immune system intersect to influence cancer treatment and immune responses against tumors.

This 10-year initiative was launched through a landmark $50 million gift from the Weill Family Foundation, which is matched with an additional $60 million in philanthropy from the three partner institutions and additional support from the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, bringing together an investment of over $125 million.

Scientific Mission

While immunotherapies and engineered immune effector cell therapies have transformed care for many patients, their effectiveness remains inconsistent, particularly in solid tumors. Critical gaps persist in understanding why some patients respond while others develop resistance, and how individual physiological factors shape those responses.

Nutrition, the microbiome, and metabolism are key regulators of immune function and the tumor microenvironment, influencing immune cell activation, differentiation, trafficking, and durability of response. By understanding these interactions, the Weill Cancer Hub East aims to uncover actionable mechanisms that can be leveraged to improve and extend the benefits of current cancer treatments.

With the guidance of institutional leadership and a scientific steering committee comprised of Sohail Tavazoie, MD, PhD; Joshua Rabinowitz, MD, PhD; and Jedd Wolchok, MD, PhD, the Weill Cancer Hub East brings together leading investigators across Rockefeller University, Princeton University, and Weill Cornell Medicine to address these challenges through integrated cross-disciplinary approaches that connect insights from basic science, translational research, and clinical medicine.

Pillar Themes

By bridging disciplines and institutions, the Weill Cancer Hub East fosters collaborations that seek to answer critical questions aligned with the following Pillar Themes:

• Diet & Microbiome
  How do diet and host microbiota shape anti-tumor immunity and resistance to therapy?
• Metabolism & Tumor Microenvironment
  How does cellular and systemic metabolism influence the immunologic permissiveness of the tumor microenvironment?
• Clinical studies
  How can we integrate advances in nutrition, metabolism and immunity to develop new and improved cancer therapies?

Collaborative Research Resources

To accelerate discovery across institutions, the Hub provides investigators with access to shared scientific resources – including platforms such as spatial and AI technologies, chemistry, computational and single-cell analysis, mouse modeling, and clinical research support – that help integrate advanced methodologies into collaborative studies.

Request for Proposals

In February 2026, the Weill Cancer Hub East launched a competitive selection process to identify collaborative scientific teams for the initiative’s next three-year research cycle, as well as pilot projects eligible for one year of funding.

To learn more, contact: Miriam Ferrer Gonzalez, PhD (mif4017@med.cornell.edu)