Jason and Keely Krantz: writing multimillion-dollar gifts for medical research where other donors still see only risk
Three years ago, a conversation over coffee between two cancer biologists at Mass General Brigham’s Charlestown Navy Yard campus produced an idea audacious enough to reshape how doctors might one day treat some of the most stubborn cancers on record.
Liron Bar-Peled and Chris Ott believed they had found a way to make “sticky” drugs that could finally hit a set of cancer genes long considered untouchable.
What they lacked was the fuel to get the idea off the launch pad.
That fuel arrived in the form of Jason and Keely Krantz, whose extraordinary generosity has, in the space of three award cycles, become one of the more consequential private forces in American cancer research.
The Krantzes’ involvement with Mass General Brigham began in September 2023 with what the hospital called the largest gift in the 34-year history of Mass General Cancer Center, and the largest cancer research-directed donation in the institution’s history, according to Mass General Brigham’s own announcement.
The hospital has never disclosed the exact size of that gift, as the Harvard Crimson noted at the time, but its structure speaks volumes about the Krantzes’ intentions: annual funding for collaborative research, capital for advanced laboratory technology, and a permanent endowment designed to keep the engine running long after any single gift is spent.
In recognition, the Cancer Center’s entire basic and translational research division was renamed the Krantz Family Center for Cancer Research, and the family’s commitment was structured around a new, competitive award program meant to reward the boldest ideas in the building.
The dollars behind that program are not modest.
The Quantum Award, the crown jewel of the series, provides up to two million dollars to a single project judged capable of transforming the fundamental understanding or treatment of cancer.
Breakthrough Awards offer up to a million dollars over two years to accelerate research that has already shown real promise.
Spark Awards deliver a hundred thousand dollars apiece to help scientists test provocative early-stage ideas before they have the data to compete for larger grants.
A separate Technology Award funds shared infrastructure, including the computational horsepower now being used to bring artificial intelligence into the cancer lab.
Since the program’s 2024 debut, when twelve awards worth a combined six million dollars went to seventeen researchers, the Krantz Center has kept pace with itself: the 2025 class, announced in December, distributed another six million dollars among nineteen scientists, according to Mass General Brigham’s newsroom.
Two full cycles in, that is roughly twelve million dollars in direct research funding on top of the original endowed gift, flowing to teams working on everything from CAR T-cell therapy to bile duct cancer to pediatric brain tumors.
What makes the Krantzes’ giving especially notable is how quickly the money has translated into visible scientific momentum.
Bar-Peled and Ott, together with computational biologist Michael Lawrence and pathologist John Iafrate, took home the inaugural Quantum Award and used the two million dollars to build out a team capable of pursuing their “protein superglue” drug technology.
Two years later, that once-speculative idea is showing real promise against cancer and other diseases, a return on investment that is hard to overstate given how few philanthropic dollars in oncology translate so directly into a functioning research program.
The 2025 Quantum Award went to Marcela Maus, Matt Frigault, and Rob Manguso, three of the field’s leading voices in CAR T-cell therapy, who are using the funding to identify which genes might make engineered immune cells effective against pancreatic cancer, a disease that has resisted nearly every major therapeutic advance of the past decade.
Jason Krantz built the wealth behind this generosity the hard way, as a serial entrepreneur who founded Definitive Healthcare in 2011 after an earlier venture, Infinata, and grew the healthcare data and analytics company into a Nasdaq-listed business, where he now serves as founder and executive chairman.
Keely Krantz has her own record of civic leadership as president and founder of the O’Dell Women’s Center in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Far from slowing down, the couple’s philanthropic and entrepreneurial footprint has only widened in the past year.
In September 2025, Jason launched Breachway Capital, a new venture and growth equity firm investing in B2B software, AI, and data companies, a move that keeps him closely tied to the technology sector even as his giving increasingly reaches into science and ethics.
That dual interest in innovation and its responsible use became public in the most current expression of the Krantzes’ generosity: in June 2026, Boston College, the couple’s alma mater, announced that Jason and Keely had made what the university called a transformative gift to establish the Krantz Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Humanity, a new center that will study the opportunities and risks of AI through a humanistic lens.
As with their original hospital gift, the university has not disclosed the dollar amount but described it in the same terms Mass General Brigham once used: transformative.
Taken together, the picture that emerges is of two philanthropists whose giving is deliberately structural rather than symbolic.
They are not simply writing checks; they are building permanent institutions, named centers, and recurring award competitions designed to outlast any single research breakthrough or news cycle.
As Jason Krantz put it in describing the 2025 award class, he and Keely remain energized by the cross-disciplinary collaborations their funding makes possible, all aimed at getting lifesaving therapies and diagnostics to patients as quickly as science allows.
With a third full year of Quantum, Breakthrough, Spark, and Technology Awards now complete, a growing venture capital platform behind them, and a new institute at Boston College just getting off the ground, the Krantz family’s philanthropic story looks less like a single generous gift and more like the early chapters of a much longer commitment to funding the ideas that other donors find too early, too risky, or too hard to explain.