Leducq Foundation

Leducq Foundation

Jean and Sylviane Leducq established the Leducq Foundation in 1996, converting the wealth Jean built through Elis and RUS — two European linen-supply giants — into a philanthropic vehicle for cardiovascular science. Today, the foundation is based in Boston and governed by a board led by Martin Landaluce, a longtime family associate, with Executive Director David Tancredi running operations. The foundation deploys capital through its International Networks of Excellence program, which funds transatlantic teams of basic and translational researchers. Since its launch in 2003, this program has committed over $500 million to multi-year projects connecting U.S. and European investigators. The foundation's other assets suggest a broader conventional portfolio: it has held limited-partnership interests in the Carlyle Europe Real Estate Partners III fund and the Resource Capital Fund VI, a global natural-resources vehicle. It also owns Ehlers Estate, a commercial vineyard in Napa Valley, through a separate entity. The Boston-based team remains compact. David Tancredi serves simultaneously as president of Broadview Ventures, a separate entity that runs a venture-philanthropy strategy targeting early-stage cardiovascular biotech. David Milan manages the scientific review process. The foundation's reach is binational by design: every grant-funded network must include at least one U.S. and one European principal investigator, effectively locking a transatlantic structure into every dollar it deploys. What separates Leducq from most large-research funders is its rigid structural commitment to international collaboration as a prerequisite for funding — a constraint embedded in its original mandate. It is not a discovery engine that funds individual labs; it is a network architect that forces institutions to build joint programs before they can access its capital, a posture that makes its grants function more like multilateral R&D treaties than conventional research awards.