$10 million latest gift from Anastasia and Igor Bukhman to School of Medicine pursues a cure for type 1 diabetes and lifts the couple’s philanthropic giving past $135 million
When Anastasia Bukhman’s three-year-old daughter, Sonya, was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, her mother spent nearly three weeks at the hospital bedside.
There she learned the routine the disease demands every day: insulin doses, blood glucose checks, and constant watchfulness against dangerous highs and lows. The family already knew the disease.
Anastasia’s father and her father-in-law were both diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in their late thirties.
“It’s a condition that has been part of our family for a long time,” she says, “and one that has played a big role in shaping the work we do today.”
That history has produced one of the most ambitious family commitments to curing the disease anywhere.
Anastasia and her husband, Igor Bukhman, have given $10 million to Yale School of Medicine through the Bukhman Foundation.
The gift funds a five-year research program in which several investigators work toward reversing, and ultimately curing, type 1 diabetes.
It is the latest step in a giving record that now exceeds $135 million.
At its center is a £100 million, ten-year pledge to type 1 diabetes research, described as the largest philanthropic commitment of its kind in the United Kingdom.
The Yale program reflects the family’s belief that no single approach will defeat the disease. It brings together specialists in immunology, cell biology, computational biology, and clinical medicine.
The work is led in part by Kevan Herold, MD, the C.N.H. Long Professor of Immunobiology and of Medicine, whose research aims to stop the immune system’s attack on insulin-producing beta cells.
“The research is very goal-directed, and that goal is the prevention or reversal of disease,” Herold says. He calls the program’s strength its multiple “shots on goal.”
The team will first map each patient’s immune “set point,” using single-cell technologies and artificial intelligence to identify what drives the disease in each person.
Researchers will then build personalized models by grafting a person’s immune cells and insulin-producing islets into specially bred mice, drawing on 25 years of Yale research in mouse genetics.
Those models will help scientists understand why the body’s natural tolerance breaks down and turns the immune system against its own beta cells.
They will also be used to find ways for transplanted replacement cells to survive longer and work better. The aim is treatment designed around each patient’s genes and immune profile rather than one approach for everyone.
“We are grateful to Anastasia and Igor Bukhman for their generosity and for the trust they have placed in our investigators,” says Nancy J. Brown, MD, the Jean and David W. Wallace Dean of Yale School of Medicine.
She says the gift will help researchers “transform how type 1 diabetes is treated by developing precision therapies to modify its course and eventually prevent it.”
For Anastasia, the personal focus of the work is what matters most.
“What excites me most is the opportunity to move beyond simply managing type 1 diabetes toward preventing and ultimately curing it,” she says.
“As a mother of a child who has lived with type 1 diabetes for over 12 years, I have seen the incredible progress in technology and treatment, but I also know that we are still far from solving the fundamental problem.”
She has also come to see that replacing lost cells is only half the problem.
“Replacing insulin-producing cells alone is not enough if the immune system continues to destroy them,” she says.
Both Bukhmans grew up in Vologda, a small city in northwestern Russia, where, Anastasia recalls, “philanthropy wasn’t really something I knew I could be part of.”
Igor later co-founded Playrix, one of the world’s largest mobile gaming companies.
The couple, now based in London, gave to charities informally for years.
Around 2021, they began planning a foundation to give with more purpose, and they established the Bukhman Foundation two years later.
Anastasia chairs it, and it supports type 1 diabetes research, educational bursaries, and arts and culture.
The foundation’s diabetes work now reaches across several countries.
The £100 million pledge, spread over ten years, was announced as a long-term effort to speed new treatments and a cure.
One of its first gifts, £300,000 through Diabetes UK, supports a University of Cambridge fellowship studying how common viral infections may trigger type 1 diabetes in children who are genetically at risk.
Another early gift went to the Breakthrough T1D Barbara Dewey Cammett Center of Excellence in New England, which is developing gene-edited, lab-grown islets that could be transplanted without strong immunosuppressive drugs.
A £10 million gift then created the Bukhman Centre for Research Excellence in Type 1 Diabetes at the University of Oxford.
The center funds senior academic posts, fellowships and doctoral scholarships. It focuses on early identification, immune strategies to prevent the disease, and better cell therapies.
The family has also turned its attention to children and families living with the disease today.
The foundation has formed partnerships with Life for a Child, which provides diabetes care to children worldwide, and with Breakthrough T1D UK to expand Rufus, the comfort bear given to newly diagnosed children.
A three-year collaboration with Mass General Brigham and PEN-Plus supports camps and peer networks for young people with type 1 diabetes in rural sub-Saharan Africa.
The foundation has also backed University of Exeter research into protecting insulin-producing cells from immune attack.
The Bukhmans’ arts giving adds to the same record.
Anastasia, a contemporary art collector named to the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list, made a £1 million gift to the National Portrait Gallery in London, creating Collecting the Now, a fund for contemporary portrait acquisitions.
The foundation then pledged £3 million over three years to New Curators, which trains aspiring curators from lower-income backgrounds. It also committed €3 million to Biennale College Cinema at La Biennale di Venezia to support new filmmakers.
The family supports Tate Britain’s Art Now program of free exhibitions and the South London Gallery, where Anastasia is a trustee and where the foundation supports Art Block, a free creative space for children and young people.
Most recently, the foundation began a series of site-specific commissions by contemporary artists at the Yale Center for British Art.
Anastasia hopes the family’s example will encourage others to give.
“Sometimes, seeing someone support a cause they care about is what makes you think about what you could do yourself,” she says.
She sees a particular role for private giving in medicine.
“Philanthropy is necessary because it can fund ideas and research that are still too early or too risky for traditional sources of funding, and that is often exactly where breakthroughs begin.”
Her hope for the work is simple.
“A world without type 1 diabetes,” she says.
For Sonya, it would mean getting through a day and making plans without always thinking about the disease.
“That’s the future I’m investing in, not just for Sonya, but for every child who comes after her. If we get this right, maybe one day, a diagnosis like hers won’t change a family’s life the way it changed ours.”