Bill Ackman's $400 million brain institute was inspired by his daughter—and built outside elite universities, which he says are losing talent

Bill Ackman is turning a family crisis into a very expensive science bet. He and his wife, designer and entrepreneur Neri Oxman, are launching the Ackman Oxman Institute, a Manhattan center focused on neuroscience and longevity, and he says the anchor donation will be about $400 million in Pershing Square stock, with another gift of similar or even larger size still to come.

The pitch is blunt. AOI is supposed to be “patient-centric,” not a paper factory, and Ackman says its job is to move discoveries into treatments, devices and cures faster than a university lab can. He doesn’t want an academic shop that produces “lots of papers” and “little if any results for patients.” Instead, the institute will also run its own venture funding arm, seed companies built around its work and recycle the returns back into more research.

That idea would have sounded harder to pull off five years ago, by Ackman’s own account. Back then, he and Oxman had considered a brain institute but passed because New York real estate was too costly and top scientists seemed too tied to universities. Now he says the calculus has changed: the property was available at a 70% discount, and universities have become a “much less attractive place to work,” in his view, because of campus politics, antisemitism and shrinking funding.

The physical scale is serious, too. The Pershing Square Foundation has bought a nearly vacant 400,000-square-foot biotech building on Manhattan’s West Side, has an adjoining 130,000-square-foot building under contract and is taking a neighboring vacant lot as well. With more construction allowed under current zoning, Ackman says the campus could grow to 680,000 square feet, which he says would be larger than Rockefeller University’s laboratory footprint.

AOI will also reach beyond one institution. Mount Sinai is an important partner, but not the only one, and Ackman says no single place has a monopoly on the best ideas or the best people. The institute is still staffing up, with a CEO expected by October and searches underway for a chief scientific officer, a chief AI and technology officer and other senior leaders. Its board already includes Dean Kamen, George Yancopoulos, James Rothman, Bernardo Sabatini, Chris Kellner, Olivia Flatto, Oxman and Ackman himself.