Franklin Salisbury, Jr.

Franklin Salisbury, Jr. has a background in economics, law and religion. Trained in resource economics at Yale, he has spent his career fostering innovative collaborations with experts in different fields so they might work together to address and solve acute social, healthcare and environmental issues.

Bachelors of Economics, Yale University
Masters of Religion, University of Chicago
Juris Doctor, University of Chicago School of Law

Salisbury served as CEO of the National Foundation for Cancer Research from 1997-2018 where under his leadership NFCR has become a catalyst stimulating the kind of “disruptive innovation” to accelerate new approaches to preventing, diagnosing and treating cancer. Many of the strategic research initiatives of NFCR have become a global research platform that is facilitating both basic and translational research to accelerate cancer research and transform 21st century cancer prevention, diagnostics and care.

Salisbury is also a co-founder of the Asian Fund for Cancer Research, headquartered in Hong Kong, which has enabled cancer researchers in Asia and worldwide to pool their resources and stop duplicating their efforts—accelerating discoveries being made and reducing the cost of achieving them for Asian prevalent cancers.

In 2018, Salisbury co-founded the Adaptive Innovative Medical Hi-Impact Initiatives Translational Research Fund (AIM-HI), a 501(c)(3) accelerator fund which provides university based oncology startups with funding to bridge the “Valley of the Death.” The AIM- HI Translational Research Fund supports a virtual “pipeline” of cancer therapeutics development from the discovery phase through several stages of clinical evaluation, accelerating FDA approval and commercialization of these new approaches to preventing, diagnosing and treating cancer. Eight startups have been launched to commercialize the research discoveries for potential new treatments.