Kanaly Family Gives $150,000 to Medical School Research

Recently, Deane Kanaly, founder of Houston-based financial planning and investment management company, Kanaly Trust, wrote an article encouraging business professionals to make charitable contributions. Following this example, the Kanaly family has committed a total of $150,000 to support neurology research at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston.

The donation comes in the form of two gifts. Deane Kanaly and his wife, Ginger, have pledged $100,000. Half the funds will support Parkinson’s disease research, under the direction of Mya Schiess, M.D., director of Movement Disorders and Neurodegenerative Disorders, at the Medical School. The other half of the gift will support multiple sclerosis research, under the direction of Jerry S. Wolinsky, M.D., holder of the Bartels Family and Opal C. Rankin Professorships in Neurology.

Mya Schiess, M.D.

Jerry Wolinsky, M.D.

Another $50,000, which also will be split between the two research projects, has been pledged by Deane’s son, Drew Kanaly, and his wife, Lisa. Drew Kanaly proposed the idea to the family about giving to the UT Medical School.

In his Houston Business Journal article, published in November, Deane Kanaly wrote of philanthropy as a “win-win” situation. “The family benefits by giving back while learning more about and satisfying community needs. The charity benefits by receiving funding for worthwhile causes.”

The Kanaly family believes they have found two worthwhile causes in the work of Wolinsky and Schiess. “We were very impressed when we met with both Dr. Wolinsky and Dr. Schiess,” Deane Kanaly said.

“We hope their research will mean the beginning of the end of MS and Parkinson’s.”

Schiess shares this hope. “Our goal for this funding is to identify the mechanisms of cell death in Parkinson’s disease,” she said. “Once the mechanism of cell death is understood, then appropriate therapeutic and neuroprotective interventions can be explored and developed.”

The Kanaly family gift will fund a study aimed at determining the underlying cause of the disease.

Schiess says that without generous private sector funding, research like hers would be slow, at best, and some projects might be shelved awaiting government grants.

“It is synonymous to a gift of time where we can simply proceed with the actual research and not be in limbo during federal grant review cycles or because of poor national funding support,” Schiess said.

“I am sincerely grateful for the Kanalys’ support,” she said. “I look forward to showing them results that ultimately will impact Parkinson’s disease patients and lead to neuroprotective and preventative therapies.”

Drew Kanaly, former UT Health Science Center at Houston Development Board member from 1999 to 2003, also looks forward to seeing the research results, as he and his family have grown frustrated with what he describes as a lack of adequate study of the disease.

“We felt it was time that we advanced research on Parkinson’s disease. A lot of work is being done on treatments, but very little is being done on finding a cure,” Drew Kanaly said. “Also, Dr. Wolinsky is a world-class researcher on the forefront of MS research. We felt that both he and Dr. Schiess would put the money to good use.”

Wolinsky said he appreciates the confidence the Kanalys have shown in the work performed at the Medical School. “

There are a lot of us up and down the street who are working on MS on one level or another,” Wolinsky said. “It’s wonderful that the Kanalys have singled us out and that they believe we can make the most of their money.”

Wolinsky recently returned from trips to Cambridge, England, and Munich, Germany, where he met with colleagues to develop a new international studies program in bioinformatics related to multiple sclerosis. Wolinsky said that gathering and analyzing data on MS allows clinicians to better predict the course of the disease, and can help them plot the most effective treatment options for each patient. He, like Schiess, said private sector funding is vital in the early stages of developing such programs.

“Doing things like this requires flexible funding until you can get programs off the ground,” Wolinsky said. “Funding such as the Kanalys’ gift, helps us go places with programs that are new and helps us launch programs prior to securing NIH (National Institutes of Health) funding.”

He said private gifts to help establish research projects can eventually offer leverage for other funding by providing researchers with the resources to gather “preliminary data that the reviewer can use to determine that the investigator can deliver what the application proposes.” Drew Kanaly has high hopes for the research of Wolinsky and Schiess.

“We’re big believers in UT’s focus on cures and not just treatment,” Drew Kanaly said. “Treatment is, of course, important, but we really want to contribute to finding cures.”

Deane Kanaly founded Kanaly Trust in 1975. He was named Entrepreneur of the Year in Financial Services by Ernst & Young in 2002. All three of his sons, Steve, Jeff and Drew, attended UT Austin and all have joined the family business.

By Wendy K. Mohon, Development