$50 Million Gift to Transform Penn’s Colton Center for Autoimmunity into a World-Class Research Hub

A landmark $50 million gift from philanthropists Stewart and Judy Colton is set to transform the Colton Center for Autoimmunity at Penn Medicine into an internationally leading hub for autoimmune research and treatment. The gift — the largest in the center’s history — builds on the Coltons’ original $10 million donation that established the center at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine in 2021.

The new funding will enable the center to create a dedicated physical home co-located with Penn’s immune health, vaccinology, and virology programs, fostering cross-disciplinary collaboration under one roof. It will also fuel aggressive faculty recruitment, expansion of Penn’s Immune Health platform, new internal and external grant programs, adaptive clinical trials, and a major scaling of artificial intelligence and big data capabilities.

Led by Dr. E. John Wherry, chair of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics, the center brings together researchers and clinicians at the forefront of autoimmune disease — conditions that affect more than 23.5 million Americans and cost the healthcare system over $100 billion annually. Diseases in this category include celiac disease, Type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and rheumatoid arthritis, and disproportionately affect women.

The gift also deepens Penn’s role in the Colton Consortium, a four-institution collaboration spanning Penn, NYU, Yale, and Tel Aviv University. Together, the consortium aims to leverage each institution’s complementary strengths to collectively advance the science of autoimmunity on a global scale.