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Moores Cancer Center building at UC San Diego Health in La Jolla

Curebound’s Robin Toft is making the case for private money in San Diego cancer research

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The Moores Cancer Center at UC San Diego Health, one of the institutions whose researchers receive Curebound grants. Photo: TritonsRising, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Robin Toft spent about two decades as a biotech executive and another ten years placing other people in the top jobs at life science companies. This year she took one herself, at a San Diego nonprofit that is trying to fill a hole federal research funding is leaving behind.

Toft became CEO of Curebound on Jan. 1. In October, the San Diego Business Journal named her its 2026 Nonprofit Executive of the Year, an honor she shares with Ben Moraga, president and CEO of the Rancho Santa Fe Foundation.

Switching seats

Toft didn’t come to Curebound from outside. She was already on its board when founding CEO Anne Marbarger decided to step back after five years. Marbarger stayed on the board as an adviser, and the organization skipped a search.

“This is kind of like Nirvana, where you actually have someone on the board who could step into the CEO role as the organization scales,” Toft told the Business of San Diego newsletter when the change was announced last December. “We like to describe it like we’re just switching seats.”

Her background is mostly on the business side of biotech. Before Curebound, she founded and ran Toft Group Executive Search, which placed more than 500 life science executives and was acquired by ZRG Partners in 2019. The firm made a point of recruiting women and people of color for leadership roles, pushing back against what Toft has described as unconscious bias in executive hiring. Earlier, she held executive roles in biotech and sat on boards including Syapse and T2 Biosystems.

She also has a personal stake. Toft is a 20-year colon cancer survivor.

What Curebound does

Curebound launched in 2021, formed from the merger of Padres Pedal the Cause and the Immunotherapy Foundation. It raises money from the public and from companies and gives it out as research grants, mostly to teams that cross institutional lines.

Its partner institutions read like a map of the Torrey Pines mesa: UC San Diego, the Salk Institute, Sanford Burnham Prebys, Scripps Research, the La Jolla Institute for Immunology and Rady Children’s Hospital San Diego. Much of its grant money goes to teams that pair scientists from different institutions, the idea being that the region’s density of researchers is an advantage only if they actually collaborate.

According to the organization, Curebound has now awarded $50.5 million in grants supporting 170 studies across 23 types of cancer. That’s up from about $37 million when Toft was named CEO.

The money comes from a few big events and a lot of individual giving. The Curebound Cancer Challenge, the bike ride and run that grew out of Padres Pedal the Cause, drew about 3,000 people in summer 2025 and raised more than $3 million. The annual Concert for Cures at Petco Park has featured performers including Alicia Keys, Ed Sheeran and Elton John. Corporate sponsors have included Vividion Therapeutics, Edward Jones and Illumina.

The funding argument

Toft’s pitch has gotten sharper this year as federal science budgets have tightened. National Institutes of Health grant cuts and delays have hit university labs across the country, and San Diego, with one of the densest concentrations of biomedical research anywhere, has felt it.

“As federal funding declines, it’s time to build on advances already made and keep up the momentum in cancer research,” Toft said in a statement after the award. She noted that about one in two people are expected to be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetimes.

Private philanthropy can’t replace NIH dollars at scale. What groups like Curebound can do is keep promising early projects alive, fund the kind of cross-institution work federal grants don’t always reward and help researchers get the preliminary data they need to win larger grants later.

Building the team

When she took over, Toft said Curebound had about 22 employees and no full executive team. One of her first priorities was hiring a chief advancement officer to lead fundraising. The longer-term plan, she has said, is to expand access to cancer screening, care and clinical trials, and to grow Curebound’s reach beyond San Diego.

She has been blunt about the ambition. “We believe Curebound is going to be the headquarters of curing cancer in the country,” Toft said. “We have the best and brightest biotech minds and academic minds working together.”

Outside Curebound, Toft is a limited partner at How Women Lead and serves on the boards of the American Cancer Society’s San Diego operation and the La Jolla Institute for Immunology.

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