MORGANTOWN – Medicine and money.
During Friday’s meeting of the West Virginia University Board of Governors, President Michael Benson was joined by Dr. Clay Marsh, chancellor and executive dean for Health Sciences, in championing a burgeoning relationship that could advance the university’s standing on both fronts.
Earlier this month, the WVU Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute hosted Gerald Chan, chairman of Cognito Therapeutics, a private company focusing on gamma wave activity in the brain to develop novel and innovative therapeutics with the potential to improve the lives of patients suffering from neurodegenerative diseases.
Marsh explained the technology.
“So this helmet goes over your head and interlocks the eyes, the visual centers, with the ears and auditory centers, and synchronizes your brain at 40 hertz, which is a very high frequency,” he said. “And so it’s really important because at that level, this is what people in really deep meditation, Tibetan monks, this is where they get. This is where people have had sort of out-of-body experiences.”
The private company is testing whether using the device can help the brain recover from injury and resist neurodegenerative diseases.
“They’ve gotten some really interesting results on the clearance of plaques and Alzheimer’s disease, healing of the brain and brain injury,” Marsh said.
Benson said Cognito Therapeutics is looking at WVU as a potential partner in that testing.
“This helmet he’s talking about. He’s looking for a place to try it out, and [they] have targeted some of our populations to use it,” Benson said.
As part of his remarks, Marsh noted that Chan’s father is the late Hong Kong real estate magnate T.H. Chan.
The Chan family, through The Morningside Foundation, have made significant contributions to various institutions of higher education.
Most notably, in 2014, Harvard University announced the largest gift in the school’s history at the time – $350 million to support the Harvard School of Public Health. The university, Gerald Chan’s alma mater, bestowed the name Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in recognition.
In 2021, the University of Massachusetts announced a $175 million donation from The Morningside Foundation to UMass Medical School. The school was renamed the UMass Chan Medical School, which includes the T.H. Chan School of Medicine, the Tan Chingfen Graduate School of Nursing and the Morningside Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, according to the 2021 press release.
On that front, Marsh said the relationship could potentially lead to opportunities for WVU that go well beyond the science.
“This was two weeks ago, and he’s already scheduled a return visit,” Benson said of Chan. “So, very excited about this.”
