Skip to contents
In This Issue:
Award in Collaboration with Harvard Medical School and Affiliates
Earlier this week, the Las Vegas-based Donald W. Reynolds Foundation announced a $24 million award to establish a Reynolds Cardiovascular Clinical Research Center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) under the direction of Peter Libby, MD. The award marks the largest single philanthropic gift received from a private foundation in the hospital’s history.
Libby, program director of the Center, will be joined by Paul Ridker, MD, and David Kwiatkowski, MD, of BWH, and Ralph Weissleder, MD, of Massachusetts General Hospital as Reynolds Investigators. The Center will collaborate with HMS affiliates Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Joslin Diabetes Center, as well as with scientists at a number of other nationally acclaimed research institutions, including Columbia University and the Framingham Heart Study.
"This reflects an enormous amount of hard work on the part of this research team and recognizes the significant advancements made at BWH and HMS in the field of atherosclerosis and inflammation,” said Libby. “We are honored to receive this significant grant from the Reynolds Foundation to accelerate our work in this area.”
Specifically, the grant will support efforts to develop new risk measures for physicians to use in assessing atherosclerotic heart disease. Researchers hope to identify new biomarkers through genomic technology and validate them through the use of information generated by the Women’s Health Study based at BWH and other sources. The award will also support further research on the biology of vascular inflammation and a project to apply advances in molecular imaging to the diagnosis and treatment of atherosclerosis.
The Donald W. Reynolds Foundation is a national philanthropic organization founded in 1954 by the late media entrepreneur for whom it is named. Reynolds was the founder and principal owner of the Donrey Media Group, which he created in 1940 with the purchase of the Okmulgee Daily Times (Oklahoma) and the Southwest Times Record (Arkansas). Headquartered in Las Vegas, NV, the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation is one of the 50 largest private foundations in the United States.