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.