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Murdock announces campaign for MS research
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Published: April 23, 2009
Updated: 04/23/2009 02:59 pm
KANNAPOLIS - At first glance, Briana Landis is just a regular 11 year-old kid.
She attends Kannapolis Intermediate School. She runs in 5Ks and she hangs out with her friends.
You could never tell it by looking at her that she has multiple sclerosis.
Now, thanks to a $1 million grant from Charlotte philanthropist Herman Stone, the North Carolina Research Campus will have a team in the Core Research Laboratory focused solely on MS.
For Briana and other MS sufferers, it is a gift of hope.
"I'm very excited and blessed," she said.
Together with Dole Food Company owner David Murdock, Stone, who founded Consolidated Theaters, said he wanted to raise $5 million to fund the research at the Core Lab, specifically the work of Dr.
Simon Gregory, a geneticist and MS expert with Duke University.
"I'm a very selfish man," Stone said, jokingly, "I want him 100 percent."
The $5 million campaign, called "On the Shoulders of Giants" will help fund Gregory's work and other research labs around the country that are working on MS.
Stone said he wants to get "a million people to donate small amount — $5, $10, $50."
"We can raise money a little at a time," he said, "to do a lot of wonderful things at the research campus."
Stone is also on a personal mission: His two children have MS.
"My dream was to have a lab here that could eradicate MS," Stone said.
Stone met with Murdock and told the research campus founder his dream.
"He told me, 'You raise $1 million and I'll make your dream come true'," Stone said.
Multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune disease that affects the central nervous system. It strips away the protective coating around nerve cells, which affects how the brain communicates with the nerves.
It has many symptoms – from numbness to blindness, cognitive dissonance, motor problems and paralysis. It strikes in early adulthood and can take years to develop.
There isn't much known about the disease, said Dr. Gregory at a press conference Thursday, and there is a lot to learn.
Gregory is helping to build the genetics lab at the David H. Murdock Research Institute in the Core Lab. He and his colleagues are hoping to build on a genetic discovery made two years ago: That a gene on the fifth chromosome plays a role in the development on MS.
"MS could be caused by environmental factors, not just genes," Gregory said. "That is very hard to determine when you are asking patients to remember what vaccines they had, where they lived."
There are more questions than answers: Is it just one disease or a combination of diseases? Why does the disease progress faster in some patients than in others?
"There is still a lot to find out," Gregory said. "Science lives and dies by grant money. We can't do it as a hobby. The work stops without the money."
Duke is leading the medical research effort at the research campus with its MURDOCK Study, a longitudinal research project that aspires to "rewrite the textbook of medicine" by looking at the genetic causes of human disease. Cardiovascular disease, hepatitis, obesity and diabetes are just some of the diseases Duke researchers with the MURDOCK Study are tackling.
Now MS will be added to the list of diseases the MURDOCK Study will tackle. That gives MS patients like Briana Landis and Jill Lassetter of China Grove hope.
"I don't believe MS gets the same attention that cancer and other diseases get," Lassetter, 47, said.
Lassetter was diagnosed with MS seven years ago, when her right hand went numb. She said she started feeling the pins-and-needles effect that you get when your foot goes to sleep.
She felt that all the time. Soon after, her entire right side of her body went numb.
"When I was diagnosed, I realized I had MS years before," she said.
Lassetter has relapsing remitting MS, where the disease progresses in episodes. A patient may feel a symptom for a week and then it may go away, Lassetter said.
"There may be days where you are fine and there are other days you're in bed," she said.
For Tonda Coutu, 63, her diagnosis came late.
"The doctors didn't know what I had and they told me that it was psychological," the Salisbury resident said.
Her symptoms were misdiagnosed for nine years, Coutu said, before she got the MS answer in 1994.
She has lived with it since, and the disease has affected her gait, hands and cognition. It has also tied to another condition Coutu suffers from — trigeminal neuralgia, which causes excruciating pain in her face.
She takes injections of interferon, the main drug used to fight MS, and enough Oxycontin "to kill an elephant," she said.
"There are 720 shots I take in a year," she said, "of one drug. And the interferon is $9,000 a month. Many people who are diagnosed and don't have insurance have to go on Medicaid."
The shots are what get to Briana, her mother, Kathi said.
We give her a shot every other day," she said. "It's not fun around our house on shot day — when you make your child cry."
Briana said she hopes for a cure, but if she can't get a cure, she said she hopes scientists can find a better way to administer the drugs so she doesn't have to take shots.
Coutu said she has nine grandchildren, all who walk with her in the MS Walk.
"It's an insidious, horrible disease," Coutu said, "and I don't want them (my grandchildren) to deal with this disease."
To donate to the "On The Shoulders of Giants: the Carolinas Campaign to Cure MS," visit www.msgiants.org.
• Contact Web reporter Ben McNeely: 704-789-9131
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