Jan. 16, 2026
Bridges with Foundation and Industry Partners
Industry and foundation alliances help us bring lifesaving ideas to patients.
TOPICS: Partnerships | School of Medicine
Designs on Aging-Ready
By Strategic Communications
Foundation and industry partners are key to the University of Pittsburgh’s efforts to lead in health product development, commercialization and manufacturing. A prime example—Pitt BioForge, the massive life sciences project at Hazelwood Green funded by a $100 million grant from the Richard King Mellon Foundation. The Henry L. Hillman Foundation will also support bioanalytics at BioForge through a recent $6 million commitment.
ElevateBio, the anchor tenant, is scheduled to open its second cell and gene therapy manufacturing operation in the first half of 2027, accelerating the rate at which new biologic precision medicines are produced. Live-cell and genetic therapies, for instance, hold great promise for addressing diseases and conditions that pills can’t. Yet these therapeutics are difficult to manufacture, hard to get to a large number of patients and expensive—some therapies can cost upward of $4 million for a single dose. The BioForge team plans to change that.
“At a higher level, we are aligned with academic partners like Pitt in a shared mission: to restore lost functions and improve lives. That only happens when basic science is paired with the rare ability to carry it through to translation and clinical readiness.
Florian Solzbacher, Blackrock Neurotech cofounder and chair
Hooman Rashidi, Pitt School of Medicine’s associate dean for AI in medicine and executive director of the Computational Pathology and AI Center of Excellence (CPACE), points to a partnership with the technology company Leidos as an example of how important industry alliances are.
Leidos and Pitt have forged a $10 million agreement that will advance work at the center. A focus of the five-year collaboration will be developing AI-powered tools for quicker detection of heart disease, cancer and other conditions, enabling earlier, more effective care management. These advancements should benefit groups facing barriers to high-level care, such as rural patients and veterans.
Blackrock Neurotech, which recently gave a $740,000 grant to further the vision research of Xing Chen, assistant professor of ophthalmology, says the expertise and translational capabilities at Pitt are key reasons why the company invests here.
“At a higher level, we are aligned with academic partners like Pitt in a shared mission: to restore lost functions and improve lives,” says Florian Solzbacher, Blackrock Neurotech cofounder and chair. “That only happens when basic science is paired with the rare ability to carry it through to translation and clinical readiness.
“Pitt has built that bridge.”