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 Institutes of Health (NIH), which are awarded on an extremely competitive basis. Partly as a result of our support, our lead researcher, Paul Wong, Ph.D., was recently named in the top five percent of all NIH grantees in the nation.

Paul’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. Uncontrolled inflammation causes heart disease, many cancers, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Multiple Sclerosis, Lupus, Arthritis, Diabetes, HIV, Pulmonary Fibrosis, and many, many others.

In the last two years, Paul’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 nine papers in prestigious scientific journals. One of those papers showed, for the first time in history, that severe neurological damage induced by his engineered virus could be prevented by a drug developed in Russia and now being tested for introduction into the United States.

The focus of the research being funded through Paul’s lab is finding an effective way to stop uncontrolled inflammation and, therefore, the damage it causes. In addition to Paul’s work in his lab, we are contributing to his collaborations with Northwestern University on MS and Alzheimer’s research, Texas A&M on neuro-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 M. D. Anderson – Science Park on skin cancer caused by radiation. Paul continues to consult and collaborate with Dr. Bill Lynn at Cato Research in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park.

Links to recent publications