The Marcus Foundation, established by Home Depot cofounder Bernie Marcus and his wife, Billi, has donated nearly $30 million to support stem-cell research at the University of Southern California (USC). The $28.7 million grant will support clinical trials of stem-cell-based therapies aimed at regenerating damaged tissue after a heart attack. Marcus, who died in November 2024 at the age of 95, had long focused his foundation’s giving on medical research.
Explaining the foundation’s approach to philanthropy in 2012, Marcus told Philanthropy Roundtable: “We decided to narrow the field to those things that I was really, truly interested in,” describing the decision as a move away from what he called a “buckshot approach.”
The foundation donated $25.9 million in 2024 for stroke research at Emory University School of Medicine and Grady Health System’s Marcus Stroke and Neuroscience Center. In 2019, it gave $20 million to establish the Department of Integrative Medicine and Nutritional Sciences at Jefferson’s Sidney Kimmel Medical College. Since Bernie and Billi Marcus established the organisation in 1989, it has awarded more than $2.7 billion through more than 3,500 grants across areas including medical research, Jewish causes, free enterprise, veterans and children’s welfare. Its first grant, worth about $110,000, went to Emory’s Egleston Children’s Research. Marcus also provided initial funding that helped launch Autism Speaks in 2005.
The grant is the largest donation the Marcus Foundation has made to USC and is among its larger contributions to academic medicine. The latest USC donation is part of the foundation’s broader focus on medical research. Other initiatives backed by the foundation include the Marcus Stroke and Neuroscience Center at Grady, the Marcus Autism Center at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and the Marcus Institute for Brain Health at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, which provides care for veterans and retired athletes with traumatic brain injuries.
The foundation’s medical giving covers five areas: stem-cell research and regenerative medicine, earlier cancer detection and treatment, autism diagnosis and treatment, integrative medicine, and cardiovascular disease, including stroke.