Overview
The researchers are finding ways to prevent excessive inflammation, and the many degenerative diseases it causes. The Longevity Foundation has virtually no overhead costs and no paid staff, allowing us to put almost every dollar into supporting research. We have chosen to channel most of our resources through M. D. Anderson's Science Park research facility near Smithville, Texas, primarily through the lab of Paul Wong, Ph.D. Dr. Wong, in turn, has leveraged these resources to assemble a very impressive array of collaborating researchers around the state and other parts of the country.
Nation-Wide Research Network Produces World-Renowned Results
Dr. Paul Wong's lab works mainly with two mouse models of degenerative disease, one the tsl viral model, and the other the A-T genetic model. Both of these models cause the same basic underlying inflammatory condition that leads to most degenerative diseases including heart disease, many cancers, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Huntington's, multiple sclerosis, lupus, arthritis, diabetes, HIV, pulmonary fibrosis, and many, many others.
The focus of the research being funded through Dr. Wong's lab is finding an effective way to stop uncontrolled inflammation and therefore, the damage it causes. In addition to Dr. Wong's work in his lab, we are contributing to his collaborations with Northwestern University on MS and Alzheimer's research, Texas A&M on neuron pathology, M. D. Anderson's Bastrop facility on anti-inflammatory drug toxicity, the University of Texas on wound healing, diabetes, and breast cancer, Baylor School of Medicine on HIV, and John DiGiovanni, Ph.D. (who is also the director of M. D. Anderson - Science Park) on skin cancer caused by sun radiation. Dr. Wong continues to consult and collaborate with Dr. Bill Lynn at Cato Research in North Carolina's Research Triangle Park.
Our funds provide the seed money necessary to secure preliminary data to apply for full-blown research projects that are very expensive and take a longer period of time to complete. The preliminary data provided by the pilot studies that we help fund are important to strengthen proposals to the National Institute of Health (NIH) that are awarded on an extremely competitive basis. Partly as a result of our support, Paul Wong was recently named in the top five percent of all NIH grantees in the nation.
During the past two years, Dr. Wong's lab has received five major grants from the NIH and has received over 10 grants from private, institutional, and academic sources. His lab has also published six papers in prestigious scientific journals, including one in the Journal of Virology that showed for the first time in history that severe neurological damage ordinarily induced by his engineered virus could be prevented by a drug developed in Russia and now being introduced in the United States.
New Pathway Discovered
One of Dr. Wong's lab's newest and most exciting projects is identifying the pathway that causes neuronal degeneration in the brain similar to that seen in Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. His lab has discovered the pathway by comparing what happens to the mice with and without a functioning A-T gene. The A-T gene seems to be essential for producing a cascade of signals that prevents a neuronal helper cell (astrocyte) from killing itself when confronted with oxidative stress. To our knowledge, this work has never been done anywhere else in the world and holds amazing possibilities for explaining and preventing a wide range of neurological diseases.
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