Cleveland’s University Hospitals network has received $50-million from a local businessman and philanthropist to invest in getting promising new treatments to market, Crain’s Cleveland Business reports.

The gift from Ron Harrington and his family is the largest in University Hospitals’ 150-year history and kicks off a $250-million drive by the health system to foster drug development. The family helped build Edgepark Medical, a leading medical-supplies retailer based in northeastern Ohio.

The larger initiative, called the Harrington Project for Discovery & Development, aims to establish a research institute to support clinical research and a commercial company to get promising treatments into advanced trials.

“We are aligning the not-for-profit model with a for-profit, which is designed to pick up technologies in the stages where they otherwise would have been abandoned,” said Dr. Jonathan Stamler, who will lead the new UH Harrington Discovery Institute.