STILL SHINING-CHRISTOPHER AND DANA REEVE
Though Christopher and Dana Reeve have both passed on, their vision for better outcomes and a better quality of life for people with spinal cord injuries are very much alive. Here Bob Yant, a leader within that organization, and the editors of ABILITY Magazine talk about how the foundation has grown in recent years, and how the field of spinal cord injury continues to expand and show promise.
Bob Yant: The American Paralysis Association was formed in 1982. Then, when Christopher Reeve got injured and joined our board of directors, we made him chairman, and brought our two organizations together. He had a $1 million foundation of his own at the time, and we named the merged organizations the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation. Later we dropped the word “paralysis” and called it the Christopher Reeve Foundation. When Dana died, the name changed again and became the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation. It continues to fund spinal cord injury research. One of Dana’s contributions was to add a program called Quality of Life grants, which range from roughly $5,000 to $15,000, and are given to organizations, usually as start-up funds for horseback riding, skiing and kayaking programs for people who are disabled.
Maybe six or seven years ago, when Christopher and Dana were still both alive, we applied to the Centers for Disease Control for a grant to tell people about how to live with paralysis. That’s grown into quite a large grant, maybe $5 million a year from the CDC. From that was born this thing called the Paralysis Resource Center in Calabasas, CA. They have information specialists out here and back in New Jersey, who are available to answer questions all day long by phone or email.
ABILITY Magazine: We’ve heard they drive around with a megaphone, too.
Bob Yant: (laughs) There’s a thing called the Paralysis Resource Guide. It’s about an inch or so thick, and it’s got all kinds of information, not only spinal cord injury paralysis, but transverse myelitis, multiple sclerosis, spina bifida.
We also raise money for the research side. That’s going well. For example, when Dana died in 2006, we were about a $14 million-a-year outfit. This year we’re going to pass the $20 million mark. We have a really dynamic guy at the top now.
AM: You make those funds available to scientists and researchers?
Bob Yant: Right. There are five parts to the research program now. One of them is what I call individual investigator grants or just individual grants. We get requests for proposals from all these scientists worldwide, and every six months there’s a deadline. We get about 100 applications, and we fund 13 to 15. We have a world-class blue ribbon science advisory council. That’s about $2.5 million to $3 million a year that we give away there, and I’m trying to bring on another group that would fund more.
Then we’ve got the consortium: seven or eight top neuroscientists worldwide, including one or two guys in England. Those guys collaborate; they also bring up a whole new generation of spinal cord injury researchers. So they’ll have one or two people in their labs who are considered to be Christopher Reeve interns or trainees. They travel frequently between labs, learning new procedures and conducting experiments.
The third part of the program is the translational research piece, where we translate positive results we get in research on animals into human results. We don’t have much going on there yet, because the animal results don’t quite warrant it. But there’s about $1 million available in that fund.
AM: And the fourth part of the program?