Billionaire Bill Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, and another, anonymous financial backer will each give Sabatini $2.5 million annually for the next 5 years to relaunch his research on cell signaling, cancer, and other topics.

The biologist, who also resigned from a tenured faculty position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) last year, is a scientific reviewer for Ackman’s Pershing Square Foundation.

At the time, Sabatini ran a lab of nearly 40 people and was an HHMI investigator and the lead scientist on five National Institutes of Health grants totaling nearly $2 million.

Sabatini’s newest chance emerged 4 days ago, as Ackerman prepared to wine and dine his foundation’s scientific advisers at Manhattan’s high-end restaurant Le Bernardin.

Ackman had reached out to Sabatini when he was first fired in 2021 and defended him in a talk last year at the annual dinner honoring scientific reviewers for the Pershing Square Foundation, which makes coveted awards to young cancer scientists in the New York area.

Nancy Hopkins, a biologist emeritus at MIT who exposed gender discrimination against female faculty there in the 1990s, says she suspects that “[Sabatini] deeply believes he did nothing wrong.