Paul Terasaki started the company One Lambda in 1984. It began with several members from his lab at UCLA. One Lambda was profitable from its 2nd year of operation and very rapidly became the leader in transplant diagnostics. When the company was sold 28 years later in 2012, it had 300 employees and had sales offices around the world. It is still one of the two or three leading companies in transplant diagnostics. Mark Terasaki, one of his sons, had nothing to do with the success of the company but he certainly benefitted greatly from its sale. In appreciation of his good fortune, he promised his father that he would do what he could to move the legacy of his research and company forward.

    After he passed away in 2016, MT met transplant people at the National Inventors Hall of Fame (posthumous election https://www.invent.org), and at the American Transplant Congress in Seattle, plus started to try to read research articles etc.  He realized that energetic smart people all over the world are working on transplant rejection, and many are actually working on an idea that Paul Terasaki proposed in 2003. Because MT didn't have the background or expertise to do transplant work himself, he decided to donate funds to support research in this field.

    The first activity was to help organize the "Paul Terasaki Antibody symposium" in July 2019, to mark the 50th anniversary of a seminal paper that he published in 1969 https:// www.tictx.org/terasaki-antibody-symposium.  After learning some of the basics about charitable giving, MT started the Paul I Terasaki Research Fund in 2019 as a donor advised fund at Vanguard Charitable. He chose 3 investigators and awarded them each $1 million grants ($200,000 / year for 5 years) - Peter Nickerson (University of Manitoba), Anat Tambur (Northwestern Medical School), and Vas Kosmoliaptsis (Cambridge, UK). This has gone very well and it is very satisfying when funded work comes to fruition.

    In the latter part of 2019, Jar How Lee and Ricky Ordonez decided to retire from One Lambda. They were both central figures in the company. They were head of research and marketing director respectively. As so often happens, the culture of a start up changes when it becomes part of a large multinational corporation. They could happily retire, but they felt like they still had the energy, desire, and capability to “do something”. After many consultations, MT decided to help set up a small research foundation around Jar How, Ricky and two senior technicians who would work for Jar How. The Terasaki Innovation Center (TIC) was incorporated in 2020 with a strong scientific advisory board and began operation in 2021.