Bill Ackman Donates $400 Million to Establish Brain Science Research Institute, Building Center for Brain Science, Rehabilitation, Brain-Computer Interfaces, and Longevity Research
Bill Ackman announced the co-founding of the Ackman Oxman Institute with Neri Oxman, donating approximately $400 million, or 10 million shares of Pershing Square Inc., to establish a center for brain science, rehabilitation, brain-computer interfaces, and longevity research.
The project stems from his 26-year-old daughter Lucy suffering a massive brain hemorrhage in February this year. Lucy underwent an emergency hemicraniectomy about 19 hours after the hemorrhage and has regained cognitive function after several weeks in a coma; she can walk over 100 steps with assistance and has begun to regain her voice, though her vision has not yet recovered.
Ackman stated that AOI will acquire approximately 3.4 acres of adjacent land near West 66th Street in Manhattan, which includes a 400,000 square foot A+ biotech facility with a 93% vacancy rate and a 130,000 square foot building at 32 West 66th Street currently used as a filming studio for Saturday Night Live; existing zoning rights allow for an additional 150,000 square feet, bringing the total area to approximately 680,000 square feet.
AOI will integrate neurosurgery, neuroscience, rehabilitation, nutrition, brain-computer interfaces, medical device development, human clinical trials, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and longevity projects. Mount Sinai will be a key partner, but AOI will not establish exclusive partnerships and plans to collaborate with other hospitals, medical schools, and research institutions simultaneously.
The institute will adopt a "non-profit + commercialization" structure: it will establish a venture capital fund to incubate, invest in, and spin off companies in treatment, pharmaceuticals, devices, and rehabilitation technologies; intellectual property licensing, equity returns, and business revenues will be reinvested into the institute to shorten the cycle from research and development to patient application.
The first 10 million shares of Pershing Square will serve as a long-term capital anchor, expected to support operations through stock price compounding and quarterly dividends; Ackman also stated that he will announce another donation of similar size or larger from non-Pershing Square assets to provide short-term and mid-term operational funding for the institute. The board includes Dean Kamen, Regeneron CEO George Yancopoulos, Nobel laureate James Rothman, neuroscientist Bernardo Sabatini, neurosurgeon Chris Kellner, and Olivia Flatto, among others.
In market mechanisms, AOI will become a long-term capital buyer for brain science, rehabilitation devices, brain-computer interfaces, AI healthcare, and longevity technologies, directing funds towards clinical talent, laboratory facilities, clinical trials, device development, and early-stage medical technology companies. Non-profit capital will bear the high risks of early research, while the commercialization entity will take on subsequent financing, regulatory approval, and large-scale production; brain-computer interface and neuro-rehabilitation companies with clinical evidence, hospital collaborations, and payment pathways will benefit, while purely conceptual projects will face higher conversion requirements.
Source: Public Information
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Ackman has previously established capital influence through concentrated holdings, long-term compounding, and aggressive activism in the public market with Pershing Square; transferring 10 million shares of Pershing Square Inc. to AOI effectively converts the rights to future cash flows from the asset management platform into permanent research capital. Unlike one-time charitable donations, equity donations bind the long-term budget of the institute to the dividends, valuations, and capital allocation capabilities of a publicly traded company, allowing the capital pool to expand as the enterprise grows.
The design of AOI is closer to a hybrid of the Broad Institute, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Flagship Pioneering: the former two rely on long-term capital and top-tier research networks to support basic research, while the latter commercializes research results through company incubation. Ackman explicitly opposes the academic model that produces only papers without patient outcomes, indicating that AOI will place clinical translation, device registration, affordability, and company creation at the center of its research evaluation system.
Brain-computer interfaces are strategically positioned in the project, directly addressing Lucy's visual and functional rehabilitation needs. Companies like Neuralink, Precision Neuroscience, Synchron, Science, and Nudge are exploring visual restoration, motor control, neural signal decoding, and neuromodulation; however, the bottleneck for BCIs from experimental implantation to large-scale patient application remains in long-term safety, surgical accessibility, signal stability, clinical endpoints, and payment systems. If AOI can place neurosurgery, rehabilitation, engineering teams, and trial patients in the same campus, it could shorten the device iteration and clinical feedback cycle.
Essentially, this is a reconstruction of the industrial chain. Traditional medical innovation is often fragmented into university laboratories, hospital clinical departments, venture capital, startups, and large pharmaceutical and device companies, leading to high coordination costs and slow results conversion; AOI attempts to compress these links using the same capital pool, the same campus, and a mechanism for spin-off companies. Its success depends on whether it can transform the case treatment experience of "infinite resources" into treatment pathways that are repeatable, verifiable, affordable, and capable of entering clinical standard processes.
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