Taube Philanthropies gives $3 million to fund Huntington’s disease research

Researchers at Stanford Medicine and the Gladstone Institutes will use the gift for gene editing and stem cell techniques to develop treatments for the neurodegenerative disorder.

Scientists at Stanford Medicine and the Gladstone Institutes have received a $3 million gift from Taube Philanthropies to fund Huntington’s disease research.

The donation will support the first efforts to use gene editing and stem cell therapies to ameliorate Huntington’s disease, a progressive, inherited neurodegenerative disease that lacks approved drugs to slow its progress and for which there is no cure.

The research team is composed of Matthew Porteus, MD, PhD, associate professor of pediatrics at Stanford, who will lead the work; Frank Longo, MD, PhD, professor of neurology at Stanford; and Steve Finkbeiner, MD, PhD, of the Gladstone Institutes’ Taube-Koret Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research. The team will also collaborate with clinical efforts at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center.

Tad Taube, founder and chairman of Taube Philanthropies, has contributed to research on neurodegenerative diseases in the past.

Approximately 30,000 people in the United States now have symptoms of Huntington’s disease, and another 200,000 people are at risk of developing it.

About Stanford Medicine

Stanford Medicine is an integrated academic health system comprising the Stanford School of Medicine and adult and pediatric health care delivery systems. Together, they harness the full potential of biomedicine through collaborative research, education and clinical care for patients. For more information, please visit med.stanford.edu.

2023 ISSUE 3

Exploring ways AI is applied to health care