The Lustgarten Foundation Receives Strategic Grant from the Cinelli Family Foundation to Advance the LUCID Platform

$350,000 gift will accelerate a data-sharing platform designed to transform pancreatic cancer research and improve patient outcomes

The Lustgarten Foundation today announced a $350,000 gift from the Cinelli Family Foundation to support the continued development of the Lustgarten United Clinical Information Database (LUCID), a platform built to give researchers shared access to high-quality clinical data from pancreatic cancer trials.

The Lustgarten Foundation, the largest private funder of pancreatic cancer research in the world, is supporting more clinical trials than ever before. At the same time, advances in technology are enabling scientists to collect far more data from every patient in those trials than was previously possible. LUCID brings that data together into a single, secure resource, allowing researchers to identify patterns across studies and answer questions that a single trial’s dataset couldn’t address on its own.

By making these datasets accessible to the broader scientific community, LUCID is designed to speed the pace of discovery, improve the design of future clinical trials, and shorten the path from finding to therapy.

“The Cinelli Family Foundation understood something important: the infrastructure behind the science matters as much as the science itself,” said Linda Tantawi, CEO of the Lustgarten Foundation. “Their support of LUCID reflects a clear-eyed investment in the systems that let the entire research community move faster, not just a single study. That kind of thinking is what the field needs more of.”

The Cinelli Family Foundation is focused on finding cures for cancer and expanding minds through education, a mission rooted in the family’s own experience with the disease. In 1976, founder Al Cinelli lost his first wife, Lois, to leukemia. Years later, his wife Sharon overcame stage IV breast cancer before being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2019. She died in 2020 after 14 months of treatment.

In her final wishes for the Cinelli Family Foundation, Sharon asked that it continue supporting education while also advancing research into the three cancers that had affected their family: leukemia, breast cancer, and pancreatic cancer. The Foundation’s support of LUCID carries that commitment forward.

“We believe meaningful progress happens when organizations are willing to think differently and work together,” said Janet Cinelli, Executive Director and President of the Cinelli Family Foundation. “LUCID is exactly the kind of infrastructure investment we look for: cross-institutional, built for the long term, and useful to more than one institution. We’re glad to be part of it.”

The grant comes as pancreatic cancer research is entering a period of expansion, with clinical trials growing in number and complexity and generating more data than any single institution can fully use on its own. Platforms like LUCID are becoming the infrastructure that turns that data into shared progress. To learn more about the Lustgarten Foundation’s research initiatives and the LUCID program, visit Lustgarten.org/lucid.