Emory University announced on Nov. 18 that The Goizueta Foundation granted the University $50 million to establish the Goizueta Institute @Emory Brain Health, an initiative to enhance research on treating brain diseases.
Emory originally launched the institute in May as Emory Brain Health Personalized Medicine Institute but renamed it to the Goizueta Institute @Emory Brain Health following the grant. The initiative “will leverage the power of large-scale data collection and analysis with patients and the health care community to predict, prevent, diagnose and treat brain disease,” per the Saporta Report.
Allan Levey, founding director of the Goizueta Institute @Emory Brain Health, said that among the institute’s main goals is developing treatments that would ultimately prevent major brain diseases.
“One of the most exciting and important discoveries over the last decade has been that most of these major brain diseases have their roots in decades of pre-symptomatic changes that are occurring in the brain,” Levey said in an interview with the Wheel. “It’s a general principle of how our brains work and how resilient our brains are, that our brains can really withstand a lot of injury before our resilience breaks down, and symptoms begin to emerge.”
The Goizueta Foundation has continuously supported the Goizueta Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and the Emory Brain Health Center. The Goizueta Foundation has now donated over $100 million to the Emory Brain Health Center, according to a Nov. 19 press release from Emory.
Olga Goizueta Rawls, board chair and CEO of The Goizueta Foundation said in a statement that Emory had been a leader in the development of technology for the prevention and treatment of brain disease.
“The Goizueta Foundation is proud to help bring these innovations into clinical practice to promote healthy aging,” she said.
“The Institute’s goals are broad by design, to tackle the major neurologic and psychiatric diseases, and the reason that we tackle them together is because we didn’t appreciate how related they were previously,” Levey said.
News Editor | Eva Roytburg (she/her, 23Ox) is from Glencoe, Illinois, majoring in philosophy, politics and law. Outside of the Wheel, Roytburg is an avid writer of short fiction stories. In her free time, you can find her way too deep in a niche section of Wikipedia.
