A $40 million gift to the Yale School of Medicine will support research and clinical infrastructure for genetic treatments of cancer.

The gift from Gilead Sciences, Inc., announced Wednesday morning, will support research that identifies molecular and genetic targets for future drugs and therapies, a Wednesday press release said. The gift will bridge research at the medical school — at the Yale Cancer Center and Smilow Cancer Hospital — with research at West Campus.

“The collaboration brings together one of the world’s top research universities and a biopharmaceutical company dedicated to addressing unmet medical needs with the goal of finding new treatments for cancer,” University President Richard Levin said in the release. “This truly is transformative support that leverages the Yale Cancer Center’s top scientists, our West Campus technology investments and the resources of the new Smilow Cancer Hospital. I can’t think of a better partner to have in this collaboration than Gilead.”

At Yale, three researchers will be primarily involved in research on the gift, Levin said in a Tuesday interview: Joseph Schlessinger, director of the West Campus Cancer Biology Institute, Thomas Lynch, director of the Yale Cancer Center, and Richard Lifton, director of the West Campus Center for Genome Analysis.

Together with last week’s announcement of a $50 million gift to the Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science, the University has surged closer to meeting the $3.5 billion goal for the five-year, comprehensive fundraising campaign, Yale Tomorrow. The campaign is set to end June 30.