A few weeks ago, I asked Clara Wu Tsai a hard question: Would you rather build the first billion-dollar WNBA team or make a major scientific discovery about human performance?
“I’d like to do both,” she laughed. And, she pointed out, they’re connected. Wu Tsai is the owner of the New York Liberty and the Brooklyn Nets. She’s been a force in growing the WNBA, with the Liberty capitalizing on its position in the world’s biggest media market to drive fandom and dollars on the way to a billion-dollar valuation.
Less known is that she and her husband, Joe Tsai, committed $220 million in 2021 to build the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance at Stanford (hence the second part of my question). The premise is that studying professional athletes—human beings at peak performance—can both drive success in professional sports and help the rest of us live healthier lives too.
Five years in, Wu Tsai is ready to share more about the work the Alliance has been doing. Headquartered at Stanford, the Alliance now encompasses more than 500 scientists across seven institutions. Scientists within this group have published 850 pieces of research, filed 28 patents, and have three drugs seeking FDA approval.
This is a research area that really needs private—billionaire—philanthropy. Federal funding goes toward the study of disease, not health, explains Scott Delp, the director of the alliance and a professor of bioengineering, mechanical engineering, and orthopaedic surgery at Stanford. “When I write a proposal the NIH, somebody has to be very sick or hurt or have a disease and then we swoop in with the science and save the day,” he says. “This really flips that discussion to understand health.” Wu Tsai realized that gap. “One of the key tenets of our philanthropy is to find quote-unquote white spaces, places where funding doesn’t exist, but it’s a subject matter of great importance, and if funded could lead to some breakthrough for a wide swath of population,” she says. “This fit that.”
One of the Alliance’s most exciting discoveries is related to muscle regeneration. In sports, this will help answer questions about why female athletes suffer more ACL injuries and how to better treat and prevent them. But it’s also led to the discovery of a new molecule involved in the regenerative capacity of muscle that is now part of a drug in an FDA trial that would maintain muscle health, mass, and strength with age.
Kate Ackerman, director of the Women’s Health Sports and Performance Institute, leads the Alliance’s work connecting this research back to female athletes. Like the rest of women’s health, female athletes are under-researched and have had training and recovery protocols that were built for male athletes. That’s of special interest to Wu Tsai, while she works to win championships for the Liberty. “Research is great, but impact comes when you are able to translate the findings onto the court or the field,” Wu Tsai says. The Tsais have already integrated new best practices for long-range travel, sleep, and nutrition for the Liberty and the Nets. Eventually, they’d like the entire NBA and WNBA to get involved.
“When you come up with an incredible breakthrough that you can translate to players, it means they can be on the floor longer, miss fewer games, and that means more fans can see their favorite athletes play more,” Wu Tsai says. “That just leads to a better product, more fan engagement, more excitement. And it’s really good for business.”
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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