A $100 million donation from one of the nation’s largest private foundations will create a first-of-its-kind consortium for cancer research.

The recipients of the Starr Foundation donation are Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Weill Cornell Medical College, the Rockefeller University, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and a Harvard and MIT-backed institute in Boston. While the donation would be considered sizable in any environment, researchers yesterday said it is particularly important now because of the recent slowdown in federal funding for medical research.

The researchers said that while private donations will not fill the shortfall from National Institutes of Health, private money could be the future for innovative, breakthrough research.

“There is no question that both initial investigators as well as long-standing established investigators are having increasing difficulty in getting their grants funded,” the dean of Weill Cornell Medical College, Antonio Grotto Jr., said. “A gift of this type to support these five institutions coming at such a critical time is especially important.”

The president of the Cold Spring Harbor facility, Bruce Stillman, said: “I think this type of funding is the wave of the future.”

Taken with a recent $50 million Starr grant for three New York-based institutions to work on embryonic stem cell research, a $100 million gift to Memorial Sloan-Kettering from publisher Mortimer Zuckerman, and a $200 million gift to Columbia University for the study of neuroscience, the donation is but a slice of the private money pie in the city.

The president and CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering, Dr. Harold Varmus, said that while the grant money poses a tremendous opportunity, it “should not be taken by members of Congress or the public as an equivalent of getting the federal funding on track.”

“Will this take up the slack entirely in monetary terms? No,” Dr. Varmus, a Nobel Prize winner and the former director of the NIH, said. “I think the money can be directed to especially productive and accomplished investigators who are doing exciting things. As a simple matter of banking it’s important that we also advocate for more spending by NIH.”

The new cancer consortium will not be housed in any one place, but will allow researchers to pool resources. Although the specific projects the five-year, $100 million gift will finance have not yet been selected, the money will in a broad sense be used for mapping cancer genes and coming up with agents to interfere with the development of cancer, Dr. Grotto said. Researchers will select specific cancers to focus on in the coming months. Grants will probably be distributed starting in 2007.

“Rather than having these various silos of knowledge that seldom get shared, we think that progress will be made much more rapidly if you have a group of institutions that have the talent that the men at this table have,” the chairman of the Starr Foundation, Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, a former CEO of AIG, said.

The Starr Cancer Consortium is not the first cancer collaboration — the New York Cancer Project has produced a large database of shared genetic material of cancer patients — but is being billed as the first major research venture of its kind.

NIH officials are actually pushing for more collaboration, saying that the higher funding levels of a few years ago are not sustainable and that research must be more efficient.