Philanthropy

Research Advances

Buildings and Laboratories

Investment in critically needed buildings and laboratories helps ensure that The Scripps Research Institute can embrace the future with confidence. The equipment Scripps Research scientists need to do their work is as varied and sophisticated as the work itself.

In Florida, a gift of $5 million will name one of three new buildings under construction on land provided by Palm Beach County. In California, a gift of $8 million will name the immunology building.

Buildings and Laboratories
Gifts can be made to fund the purchase of much-needed equipment or, in California, to support the renovation of existing facilities.

Scripps Research enjoys one of the world’s leading private computational capabilities, with an array of computers that includes LINUX high-performance computing clusters. Research is also supported by x-ray crystallography laboratories, high performance NMR spectrometry including state-of-the-art 900 and 750 MHz instruments, electron microscopy, optical spectroscopy, a centralized DNA sequencing laboratory, and a fluorescence-activated cell-sorting facility.

Scripps Research scientists require state-of-the-art facilities and equipment to remain on the cutting edge of research and rapidly advancing technology. New laboratory equipment is continually being developed to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of basic research, and new technology provides ever-shorter paths from its discoveries to their application to prediction, diagnosis, and treatment of disease. Gifts of discretionary funding are critically important to support the ongoing modernization of laboratories at the Institute.

Immunology Department
In 1961, internationally acclaimed immunologist Frank J. Dixon, Jr., M.D., came to the Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation—along with a team of young scientists that included Charles G. Cochrane, M.D., who retired as Professor of Immunology in 2005—to establish a department of experimental pathology – the genesis of The Scripps Research Institute.

Today, Scripps Research scientists focus on potential solutions for some of the world’s most puzzling and pernicious diseases: lupus, diabetes, arthritis, prion disease, HIV, Ebola virus, bacterial meningitis, chronic inflammatory disease, cancer, and many others.

Using bonds, Scripps Research recently purchased its imunology building, designed specifically for the Institute’s core department and located near both of the Institute’s other signature buildings—the Beckman Building and the Skaggs Building. A naming gift of $8 million will assure the donor an unparalleled opportunity for legacy.

Other Naming Opportunities
Other naming opportunities in the immunology building include the following:

Laboratory Floor $1,000,000
Large Conference Room $200,000
Individual Laboratory $ 75,000

Florida Naming Opportunities
Zeidler Parnership Architects of Toronto, Canada, selected a 21st Century theme design for the Scripps Florida campus projects with a bright palate of colors for its tropical setting--silver, cool green, grey-blue, and terra cotta. The three buildings encompass more than 350,000 square feet situated around a small lake designed to attract wildlife and to serve as a reflecting pool for the new structures. The emblem for the project is an 8.4 ton galvanized steel tower that tops the central building of the trio. Its twisting shape evokes the double helix shape of DNA. Rising to a point 134 feet above the ground and visible from Interstate 95, the tower was engineered to withstand 140 mph winds. Construction managers for the project are the Weitz Company of Des Moines, Iowa, one of the nation’s oldest and most highly regarded building contractors, and DPR Construction Inc., a unique technical builder with expertise in the core markets of advanced technologies, healthcare, and biopharmaceutical construction.

Central to the plan are a series of spaces intended to stimulate interaction among scientists and to encourage serendipitous discovery as active minds bump into one another in corridors, elevator lobbies and seating nooks. As a rare case of a scientific institute assembled as a unit, there will be no artifacts of an earlier science era to force compromise. Scripps Florida’s campus is a first-rate addition to the international science community.

The Drug Discovery Building will be home to most of the key components of the Scripps Discovery Pipeline. A pair of Kalypsys robot arms will anchor the screening center with its library of 700,000 chemical compounds for testing against biological activity of interest to our basic scientists. As the headquarters for Scripps Florida’s medicinal and synthetic chemistry teams, the structures of promising compounds will be copied, studied and altered to increase efficacy and to reduce unwanted side effects of potential drugs. Groups working in Chemical Biology, Discovery Biology and Drug Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics will develop strategic scientific plans and undertake experiments to accelerate the translation of basic science findings into their clinical application.

As the headquarters and nerve center for the complex, the Administration and Advanced Technologies Building in the trio will host a multitude of human interactions. At its core will be an educational pavilion that includes two classrooms and a large auditorium that will welcome to Scripps many scientific symposia to come. A large cafeteria opening onto a lakeside terrace will create a bustle of daily traffic and activity. On the second floor, a library and informatics center will be adjacent to a Founders Suite where board meetings and other important functions will take place. Basic researchers in Genomics and Protein Sciences will occupy labs in the building along with an important microscopy center for the campus.

Laboratories for Cancer Biology, Cell Biology, Neurobiology, and Infectology will make the Biomedical Research Building a hive of exciting research. Using the most sophisticated tools of computation, molecular biology, and human genetics, the scientists in these groups will help to unravel some of the most vexing questions of human biology and disease. Through interactions with colleagues in La Jolla and at other institutions, these teams can take advantage of Scripps Florida’s gathering of some of the world’s most sophisticated talent and tools for drug discovery. The success of these efforts holds great promise to streamline the agonizingly slow process of therapeutics development.

The following naming opportunities are available for Scripps Florida:

Florida Drug Discovery Building (A)

FIRST FLOOR

(4) Research Suites $1,000,000 - $3,500,000

Ultra High Throughput Robotics
Magnetic Resonance
Mass Spectrometry
X-Ray
Symposium Room $350,000
Conference Room $250,000

SECOND FLOOR

(4) Research Suites $1,000,000 - $3,500,000
Medicinal Chemistry
Chemical Biology
Discovery Biology
Drug Metabolism & Pharmacokinetics
Chairman’s Office $250,000
(2) Conference Rooms $250,000 each

THIRD FLOOR