Despite being a private institution with a $53.2 billion endowment, Harvard University is a large beneficiary of federal funding, receiving $686 million in federal dollars in FY 2024. Recently, the university has come under fire from the Trump administration, which has cut away billions of dollars of Harvard's research grants. This action has especially impacted the T.H. Chan School of Public Health, home to a large contingent of Harvard's medical research labs, which relies on government funds for nearly half of its annual budget. In response, the school has turned to the private sector for assistance.
In June, İş Private Equity, a Turkish-owned private equity firm and subsidiary of Türkiye İşbank Group, said that it would commit nearly $39 million over 10 years to support Gökhan Hotamışlıgil's "research on new antibodies for obesity and other metabolic diseases," according to Fierce Biotech.
Hotamışlıgil, a professor of genetics and metabolism, has spent over 20 years studying FABP4, a fatty-acid–binding protein. When secreted into the bloodstream, FABP4 forms "a hormone complex called fabkin," which causes adverse health effects like inflammation and obesity, explained the Chan School. Hotamışlıgil and his team have been working on ways to reduce fabkin levels and have developed a lab-engineered antibody that they think could "prevent or treat various metabolic diseases and diseases of aging."
