OMRF announced today that it has received a substantial gift from Henry Zarrow.
“There are few people who have given so much back to this state as Henry Zarrow,” said OMRF president Dr. J. Donald Capra. “For many years his generosity has touched every corner of Oklahoma. We at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation are delighted and honored to count ourselves among the many grateful beneficiaries of his support.”
“I wanted to do something that would help Oklahoma doctors save lives,” said Zarrow, a Tulsa businessman with a long history of supporting charitable causes. His gift to OMRF follows his recent announcement that he will match all donations to the Tulsa public schools, dollar for dollar, up to $1 million.
Zarrow’s gift to OMRF will help the foundation establish the state’s first magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) facility for small animals.
“It’s an MRI designed for mice,” Capra said. “With it, scientists will be able to study the cells and organs of living mice, just as doctors are able to use conventional MRIs to study human patients in hospitals.”
An MRI allows physicians and scientists to view internal organs at virtually a microscopic level without injecting dyes, without biopsies, and without surgery.
Although the MRI is commonplace in human medicine, according to Capra, there are currently no more than 12 small animal MRIs in the U.S. “Today, if an Oklahoma scientist wants to use a small animal MRI, he has to travel to Albuquerque or Houston,” said Capra. But that will change with the opening of OMRF’s small animal MRI facility, which will be a part of its recently dedicated Donald W. Reynolds Center for Genetic Research.
“OMRF’s small animal MRI will be available for use by scientists from all over the state of Oklahoma,” said Capra.
“The new facility will certainly benefit Oklahoma’s biomedical research community,” said Dr. Kent Teague, director of surgery research at the University of Oklahoma-Tulsa. “It will give scientists from across the state the capability to do new and different types of research.”
“The small animal MRI is an invaluable tool for all genetics researchers,” Capra said. “It will streamline the research process, allowing Oklahoma’s scientists to conduct their research more rapidly and effectively. Technologically, it represents a huge leap forward.”
As an example of the sort of genetic research the small animal MRI will facilitate, Capra cited the work of Dr. Jordan Tang, an OMRF scientist who has created an inhibitor that blocks the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. “In order to test the effectiveness of drugs he is developing, Dr. Tang needs to be able to understand the brain functions of a mouse as it gets Alzheimer’s,” said Capra.
Although Tang has bred mice that develop Alzheimer’s disease, he had no way to study animals’ brains while they were still alive. With the small animal MRI, Tang will now be able to take daily snapshots of a living mouse’s brain, allowing him to witness the progression of the disease in real time. “Hopefully, this will dramatically reduce the time it takes to produce a drug that combats Alzheimer’s,” Capra said.
In addition to Alzheimer’s research, OMRF scientists will use the small animal MRI to perform biomedical research in numerous different fields, including breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, lupus, arthritis, cardiovascular disease, genomics, and genetic characteristics of Native Americans.
