# Helen Diller

Source: https://onco.cc/people/helen-diller/  
OnCo record `helen-diller` (Person). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

The cancer centre at UCSF carries her name, and in 2017 the Helen Diller Foundation gave UCSF $500 million, the largest gift in its history, bringing the family's total there to $650 million.

## Summary

Helen Diller (1918-2011) and her husband Sanford Diller, a San Francisco property developer, gave the gift that named the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center at Mission Bay in 2003. In January 2017 UCSF announced a $500 million gift from the Helen Diller Foundation, the largest single donation in its history, with $400 million endowing faculty and student support and $100 million as a discretionary innovation fund, and stated that it brought the family's total giving to UCSF to $650 million. In February 2018 the Foundation committed a further $500 million toward planning a new UCSF hospital. The cancer centre that bears her name is one of the largest on the US west coast, and the endowments fund the people who work in it.

## Fields

- Kind: Person
- Last checked: 2026-09-10
- Also known as: Helen and Sanford Diller
- Tags: hero; donor
- Role: Namesake of the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center; the Diller family's UCSF giving reached $650 million by 2017
- Specialisms: Cancer centre building; University philanthropy

## Sources

- UCSF: largest-ever gift honours Helen Diller (2017): https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2017/01/405476/largest-ever-gift-ucsf-honors-philanthropist-helen-diller
- Sanford Diller (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanford_Diller

## Connected records

- institutions: [UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center](https://onco.cc/institutions/ucsf/)
- bottlenecks: [Funding follows fashion, not burden](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-funding-allocation/)

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JSON: https://onco.cc/api/v1/entities/helen-diller.json