Frances W. Preston Leaves Imprint on VICC
$16 Million Has Been Pledged
CRESTED BUTTE, CO., Feb. 10, 2000 - The Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville will name the building that is the focal point of its research activities for Frances Williams Preston, president & CEO of the performing rights organization BMI®, a VICC board member and president of the T.J. Martell Foundation for Leukemia, Cancer and AIDS Research. The announcement was made last night by Dr. Harold Moses, director of the VICC and the Frances Williams Preston Laboratories there, during opening festivities of the sixth annual Country in the Rockies, a celebrity ski event that benefits the Martell Foundation and its Preston Laboratories.
The Martell Foundation, which sponsors medical research laboratories in New York, Los Angeles and Nashville and has raised more than $140 million in its 25 year history, has pledged a $10 million gift that, along with another $6 million anonymous donation, will support the naming of the building for Preston. The gift has been committed to further research in the VICC's ongoing Imagine a World Without Cancer Campaign.
"This gift is not for bricks and mortar but will support innovative research to prevent and cure cancer," Dr. Moses said. "Frances Preston and the Martell Foundation have been key supporters of VICC since the Cancer Center's establishment in 1993. Without them, our success to date and our dreams for the future would be impossible."
"I am very proud to have been part of the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center's efforts from the beginning," Preston said. "I am even more honored to be associated with this effort now, in my hometown, as the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center and the Preston Laboratories reach for even greater heights in the future."
The Martell Foundation's gift builds on more than six years of critical support of the Cancer Center that began with the establishment of the Preston laboratories in 1993. Since then, the Foundation has provided more than $5 million in support for new research aimed at developing innovative therapies and preventions for breast, prostate, colon, ovarian and lung cancers. The gift also bring the total raised thus far in the Imagine a World Without Cancer Campaign to $86 million. The campaign, launched last spring by VICC, is designed to fund a 10-year strategic plan to aggressively target the most promising areas of cancer research with the best and the brightest scientists and physicians and the latest technologies to accomplish their work. The campaign is chaired by Orrin Ingram, president and CEO of Ingram Industries Inc., son of the late E. Bronson Ingram, longtime Vanderbilt University benefactor and trustee for whom the VICC was named last year.
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