SAN DIEGO — When Curebound needed to find a perfect A Team headliner for its 2023 Concert for Cures fundraiser, the groundbreaking San Diego philanthropic organization reached for the stars. Or, more specifically, a pop-music superstar.

The result — a private, unadvertised performance by Ed Sheeran next Friday at the Rady Shell at Jacobs Park — is a major coup for Curebound.

The plucky nonprofit was founded here in 2021 as a collaborative effort between Padres Pedal the Cause and the Immunotherapy Foundation to fund lifesaving cancer treatment and research. Alicia Keys performed at last year’s inaugural Curebound Concerts for Cures, which raised an impressive $3.1 million.

To date, Curebound has awarded over $23 million to fund dozens of cancer research initiatives through its work with such institutions as UC San Diego Health, Rady Children’s Hospital, Salk Institute, Sanford Burnham Prebys, Scripps Research and La Jolla Institute for Immunology.

In chart-topping English singer-songwriter Sheeran, Curebound has a headliner who is one of the biggest live-music attractions in the world. His recently concluded North American concert trek found him outdrawing this year’s tours by both Beyonce and Taylor Swift.

Sheeran’s sold-out Sept. 23 Los Angeles show at SoFi Stadium drew 81,000 fans. That’s the most for any event in the venue’s history, including last year’s Super Bowl.

His sold-out Aug. 26 performance at Seattle’s Lumen Field drew a record 77,286. It surpassed — by more than 5,000 — the number of attendees at Swift’s July 22 gig at the same venue.

Sheeran has released two new albums this year. The first, “Subtract,” came out May 5; the second, “Autumn Stories,” Sept. 29. He currently has 76.4 million monthly listeners on Spotify and Sheeran’s bouncy 2017 hit, “Shape of You,” has been streamed more than 3 billion times. At last count, the music video for that song has garnered more than 6.1 billion views on YouTube.

His globe-trotting “Divide Tour” stretched from 2017 to 2019 and included a sold-out San Diego date at Valley View Casino Center (now known as Pechanga Arena). It ranks as one of the highest-grossing tours of all time, with 8.9 million tickets sold and more than $776 million in revenue generated.

The fact that, until this year, all of Sheeran’s concerts were band-free solo affairs makes his popularity as a live act all the more singular. His just-concluded “Mathematics” stadium tour teamed him with a five-man backing group, although on fewer than half of the two-dozen or so songs he performed each night.

Cancer is personal for Sheeran

But the massive numbers only tell part of the story for this 32-year-old troubadour. And they don’t explain why the cancer-fighting work Curebound is doing appears to resonate so strongly for Sheeran.

In 2022, his wife, Cherry Seaborn, was diagnosed with cancer. She was in her sixth month of pregnancy at the time.

Seaborn gave birth to Jupiter, their second daughter, in August 2022. She subsequently had a tumor removed from her arm and there have been no reports of a recurrence of her cancer.

The red-haired musician addressed Seaborn’s bout with cancer in a post on his Instagram page earlier this year and the couple discussed the challenges they faced in the 2023 Disney+ documentary series, “Ed Sheeran: The Sum of it All.”

“It made me massively reflect on our mortality,” Seaborn said, in the first episode.

In his lengthy Instagram post, Sheeran explained that his wife’s cancer diagnosis prompted him to cast aside all the songs he had stockpiled for his “Subtract” album. He had also been shattered by the early 2022 death of his close friend, music entrepreneur Jamal Edwards, who suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of 31.

“Within the space of a month, my pregnant wife got told she had a tumour, with no route to treatment until after the birth,” Sheeran wrote.

These events “changed my life, my mental health and ultimately the way I viewed music and art,” he continued. “I wrote without thought of what the songs would be, I just wrote whatever tumbled out. And in just over a week, I replaced a decade’s worth of work with my deepest darkest thoughts …

“For the first time, I’m not trying to craft an album people will like, I’m merely putting something out that’s honest and true to where I am in my adult life.”

A glance at some of the song titles on “Subtract” underscores the album’s inspiration, most notably “End of Youth” and “Curtains.”

How many newer, more personal songs will Ed Sheeran perform at his Curebound Concert for Cures? To what extent will his comments from the stage be unique to the event?

The answers are one week away.

Curebound Concert for Cures: Ed Sheeran

When: 6:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 20

Where: The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park, 222 Marina Park Way, downtown

Tickets: $250 to $400 for single tickets; $3,000 to $20,000 for tables of four; $50,000 for front row or premiere tables seating up to six guests each