His Daughter Suffered A Brain Hemorrhage. He’s Betting $400 Million On A Medical Breakthrough.

Billionaire investor Bill Ackman is putting $400 million behind an ambitious new medical institute after his 26-year-old daughter suffered a massive brain hemorrhage that left her in a coma and unable to walk, speak, or see.

Ackman and his wife, Neri Oxman, are creating the Ackman Oxman Institute (AOI), a massive Manhattan-based research and treatment center focused on brain health, rehabilitation, recovery, human optimization, and longevity. 

Ackman says the institute will be deliberately different from traditional academic research centers, which produce “lots of papers, a Nobel Prize winner or two, but little if any results for patients.”

Instead, the AOI will focus squarely on cures, treatments, devices, rehabilitation, and other innovations that can improve and extend patients’ lives.

An SEC filing confirms that Ackman transferred 10 million shares of Pershing Square, the investment firm he founded, worth approximately $400 million, to the Ackman Oxman Institute as a charitable gift.

The extraordinary project was born out of a deeply personal family crisis. At midnight on February 6, Ackman awoke to news that his oldest daughter, Eloise, had found his 26-year-old daughter Lucy unconscious on the floor of her apartment in Williamsburg and called 911.

Ackman rushed to the hospital, where he eventually found Lucy unconscious on a gurney surrounded by doctors and nurses. By approximately 2:30 a.m., doctors had determined that she had suffered a massive brain hemorrhage and needed an emergency hemicraniectomy to relieve pressure on her brain and remove the blood.

The surgery, which lasted more than two hours, saved her life.

Ackman eventually used data from Lucy’s Oura Ring, a wearable health tracker that monitors things like heart rate and sleep, to determine that the hemorrhage had likely occurred around 9 a.m. the previous day. That meant more than 19 hours had passed between the hemorrhage and the completion of her surgery.

Ackman said he later learned that doctors generally would not recommend surgery to save a patient with a large brain bleed after more than five hours had passed. Even when surgery was performed, he was told, the likely outcome was months in a nursing home followed by death from pneumonia.

Ackman decided to reject those expectations and told the doctors: “Let’s see what can be accomplished if we give her the best care possible and we invest unlimited resources to restore her to life.”

That became the philosophy behind the institute he is now building.

Lucy spent several weeks in a coma. When she awoke, she could not breathe independently. She could not walk, see, or speak. Over the next six months, Ackman says Lucy regained her cognition and understands everything, including what happened to her. She can now walk more than 100 steps at a time with assistance. She is making progress with sounds, vowels, consonants, and the beginnings of speech. Her sight has not returned.

“Each day, she makes a little progress, and daily progress compounds,” Ackman wrote, adding that it will likely take years for her to recover.

That experience convinced Ackman that the boundaries of brain recovery may be considerably wider than conventional medicine currently understands.

Now he wants to build an institution dedicated to discovering exactly how far that recovery can go.

The goal, Ackman said, is to “massively” accelerate the process “from idea to innovation to production to helping a patient.”

The institute will also have its own venture funding, allowing it to help develop promising ideas into companies. Ackman says the AOI will seed and assist those companies and ultimately spin them out so new technologies, treatments, techniques, and drugs can reach patients faster. He wants the nonprofit to have “highly commercial instincts” and bring scientists, doctors, engineers, and entrepreneurs together under one roof.

It is also meant to challenge the current research system, which Ackman says has become too weighed down by politics and bureaucracy. He argues that universities have become less attractive places to work as “politics” has increasingly outweighed meritocracy, pointing to protests that disrupt learning, antisemitism, and declining funding.

Ackman says he wants the AOI to become “the best-resourced brain, rehab, recovery, and longevity institute in the world.”

Ackman’s ambitious project will be housed in a recently acquired 400,000-square-foot biotech facility on West End Avenue between West 65th and 66th Streets in New York City. The organization has also put under contract an adjoining 130,000-square-foot building at 320 West 66th Street, currently used by Saturday Night Live for studio space. 

With the existing zoning rights, the combined property could support approximately 680,000 square feet of development, according to Ackman. He says that would create a laboratory footprint larger than Rockefeller University.

The institute will bring together neurosurgery, neuroscience, rehabilitation, nutrition, brain-computer interface and device development, human trials, hyperbaric oxygen treatments, and life-extension programs on a single campus.

Ackman also said artificial intelligence will play a major role.

“AI still has a lot to learn about human intelligence and the brain,” he wrote, adding that the AOI “should be at the forefront of the interplay between the brain and AI.”

Brain-computer interfaces will be another major area of focus. Ackman believes the technology could eventually help restore functions lost through catastrophic brain injuries, including potentially Lucy’s vision. He pointed to work being done by Neuralink, Precision Neuroscience, Science, Synchron, Nudge, and other companies in the field.

“Lucy’s vision and other faculties may require some form of brain computer interface,” Ackman wrote. 

He believes the rapid development of such technologies means that patients suffering devastating brain injuries today have opportunities that would have been unimaginable to previous generations. 

“If you are going to have a devastating brain injury, now is the best time in history for that to happen,” Ackman wrote. “We have learned from Lucy that the brain can recover from even catastrophic injury.”