OMRF’s new president brings a unique perspective to medical research.
Putnam City Schools has raised millions to support cancer research. And they’re not done yet.
Oklahoma’s lupus cohort marks 20 years.
Dr. Magdalena Bieniasz is charting a new course against ovarian cancer.
A west coast transplant aims to improve cancer therapy.
How can a bacteria found in a hot spring play a role in decoding human genes?
Former OMRF intern Bartees Cox Jr., a.k.a. Bartees Strange, hits it big as a rock ‘n’ roller.
For Norman real estate Nancy Yoch, medical research is personal.
Like every institution, OMRF began as an idea. “While the world was still engaged in a war of destruction,” explains an early fundraising brochure, a group of University of Oklahoma College of Medicine faculty and alumni “were dreaming of a world in which medical advances would alleviate pain and disease.” That dream was set to […]
Feb. 22, 1948 – May 28, 2021 Dr. Stephen Prescott came to OMRF with impeccable credentials. A physician-researcher, he’d enjoyed a stellar career in the laboratory before pivoting to administration, where he’d led a prestigious cancer institute. There was, says OMRF Board Chair Len Cason, only one slight blemish on his resume: “He was a […]
Okay. We still have a ways to go in this decade. But even in spite of the pandemic, the 2020s are off to a strong start at OMRF. Dr. Lijun Xia published groundbreaking new research in the journal Science and secured a new $13.1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Courtney Griffin […]
In 2011, OMRF completed the largest campus expansion in the foundation’s history. With the construction of a new research tower, OMRF added 186,000 square feet of research and clinical space to its research campus. Funded through a combination of private gifts and state and federal grants, the facility houses dozens of laboratories, an imaging and […]
The new millennium began with a bang at OMRF, as Dr. Jordan Tang, above, and his research team identified and cloned the enzyme believed to cause Alzheimer’s disease. Soon after, the OMRF scientists designed an inhibitor that stopped the enzyme in its tracks. The discoveries led to the development of an experimental drug acquired by […]
A patent provides its owner with an exclusive right to a new invention. And beginning in the 1990s, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted a multitude to OMRF, sometimes more than a dozen in a single year. Only a decade earlier did Congress give OMRF and others the right to patent inventions that stemmed […]
When Dr. William Thurman, above, took the helm of OMRF, he brought the lab coat he’d worn since his days training as a pediatric oncologist. That powder-blue garment, along with the bow ties he favored, would become synonymous with OMRF throughout the 1980s (and most of the 1990s). But his sartorial flourishes would prove the […]
Twenty-six years after he co-authored a paper identifying DNA as the “transforming principle” that determines specific characteristics in the course of human reproduction, Dr. Colin MacLeod became OMRF’s first full-time president in 1970. Up until that time, representatives from OMRF’s board of directors – who also held day jobs as businesspeople and attorneys – served […]
OMRF kicked off the 1960s with a liberating milestone, retiring the mortgage for construction of the foundation. Tulsa oilman and philanthropist John Mabee donated $150,000 to pay off the debt. That major gift would prove the first of many from the fortunes of Mabee and his wife, Lottie, whose namesake foundation has since donated more […]
Construction of OMRF’s first research labs wrapped up in the fall of 1950, and the foundation christened the facility with an open house that welcomed 4,000 visitors. “Areas drawing particular interest included the system of tunnels, the radio-isotope laboratory, the controlled temperature lab, a display of scientific equipment, the animal wing and its first ‘occupants,’ […]
