Posts
Few people can say their battle with bipolar disorder inspired a $1 billion injection into research — but few people are Jonathan Stanley.
The Stanley Family Foundation, where he sits on the board, will donate $280 million to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard to investigate potential new treatments for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, the Broad recently announced.
That commitment launches the family’s philanthropy into a new stratosphere. They already gave more than $825 million to the Broad, including a $650 million donation that was the largest ever in psychiatric research in 2014. The money is the life’s earnings of Stanley’s now-deceased parents, Vada Stanley and Ted Stanley, who made his fortune heading MBI, a Connecticut company that markets and sells collectible books, jewelry, coins, and other products.
“He knew eventually he wanted to focus in on one thing,” Jonathan Stanley said of his dad’s charitable ambitions. “I gave him that one thing.”
Restrained in a psychiatric unit after a terrifying bout of psychosis in the 1980s, Stanley wasn’t sure that he could ever return to being the high-achieving son set to follow in his father’s high-achieving footsteps.
Stanley was a Williams College student studying abroad in London when the symptoms first hit: swells of high energy and racing thoughts that bordered on delusional. He felt like the smartest man in the world, on the cusp of building a business empire. He called his parents repeatedly asking for more money. Then, he would swing into episodes of deep depression.
His illness hit a fever pitch during a trip to New York City. Paranoid that the people around him were secret agents, he didn’t sleep for three days. He wandered into a deli and jumped on a milk carton to save himself from nonexistent radiation he thought was seeping out of the floor. The police brought him to the psych ward.
Stanley, now age 60, was one of the lucky few. During his seven-week stay at the hospital, his doctors found a medication combination that tempered the bouts of manic highs and depressive lows that define bipolar disorder. He recovered, went to law school, and had a fulfilling career.
His parents were traumatized by the experience and determined to keep other families from having to go through the same pain and uncertainty. In 2007, the family founded the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad to explore the genetic links that could explain why Stanley and others like him develop the disease in the first place.
More than 4 percent of US adults experience bipolar disorder at some point, the National Institute of Mental Health estimates. And while the prevalence of schizophrenia is low — somewhere between 0.25 and 0.64 percent in the United States — it’s a leading cause of mortality in young people.
Bipolar disorder is marked by episodes of mania and depression that can interfere with decision-making. Schizophrenia affects memory and thinking and can cause hallucinations, delusions, or disorganized speech or behavior. Both diseases can appear in different forms and can involve psychosis, making diagnosis difficult.
For years, there were virtually no treatment options for either disorder. Lithium, one of the medications that worked for Jonathan Stanley, is a mood stabilizer used to combat bipolar disorder, but scientists still don’t know exactly how or why it works.
“It works sometimes. Not all the time, but sometimes,” said Benjamin Neale, codirector of the Stanley Center.
That’s why Neale and the Stanley Center’s community of more than 100 scientists are investigating which genes might be involved in the development of these disorders.
On the pathway of drug discovery and development, the center’s work sits at the early end: sequencing the DNA of patients to identify genetic variations, and then understanding how those changes influence the nervous system.
Scientists can then use these discoveries to find and test molecules that could temper the effects of the genetic variations.
“Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are amongst the illnesses with the largest unmet medical need of anywhere in medicine,” Neale said. “There’s huge potential for impact, but there’s a lot of work to do to get there.”
The new gift from the Stanleys provides a guaranteed financial foundation amid an uncertain federal research funding landscape. Scientists have the space to try new methods without fear of disappearing funds.
Already, the Stanley Center has been involved in massive genomic sequencing studies that have identified some early genetic variant targets. A 2016 study there found people with specific variants of the immune system gene C4 have an increased risk for developing schizophrenia.
“We have a desperate need to better understand the root causes of these conditions, and the work going on at Broad’s Stanley Center gives patients and their loved ones some of the best hope that we have,” National Alliance on Mental Illness chief medical officer Dr. Ken Duckworth said in a news release.
There was never any doubt that the foundation would continue to give huge sums to the Stanley Center, Stanley said.
“First of all, everybody’s super impressed by the Broad,” he said. “But probably most of all, to me at least, it’s because it’s what my dad wanted.”
Marin Wolf can be reached at marin.wolf@globe.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment