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High-schoolers donate ALS research lab to SBU
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| | | Some of the Northport High School students involved in A Midwinter Night’s Dream gathered at Stony Brook University Medical Center on June 8 to donate $125,000 to a new SBUMC cryopreservation laboratory dedicated to advancing ALS research. Also pictured, from right: Don Strasser, Northport High School science teacher; Mary Kritzer, Ph.D., assistant professor of neurobiology and behavior and Glen Itzkowitz, assistant dean for scientific operations. Courtesy Sam Levitan Photography (click for larger version) | |
June 24, 2009 | 03:36 PM
After six years of tireless fundraising, a group of 42 students from Northport High School reached another milestone in donating $125,000 toward a state-of-the-art research lab at Stony Brook University Medical Center.
Named for their annual fundraisers and eponymous committee, the "A Midwinter Night's Dream Cryopreservation Laboratory" would help realize the students' dream of finding cure for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig's Disease.
SBU Professor Mary Kritzer, who works with some of the Northport students on their neurobiology internships, called the group's gift "extremely forward-thinking."
The lab's resources will enable researchers "to explore current ideas about the causes and most promising therapies for ALS and other disorders, as well as collect and preserve models over time," Kritzer said.
Among other things, it would house frozen samples of diseased tissue for experimentation, which is crucial to researchers who need to study the progression of the disease at different points in time.
Northport High School honor society students said they were inspired by Chris Pendergast and David Deutsch — two teachers in the district who were stricken with the disease in 1993 and 2004, respectively — to start a fundraising committee that, in addition to smaller occasions, runs a star-studded event at Oheka Castle in Huntington each January. Since 2005, the committee has raised more than $1 million to benefit ALS research.
Last year, committee members set their minds to helping create a lab, Northport science teacher and student advisor Don Strasser said.
Their idea gelled when the university's administrators learned of their intentions and told the students of their desire to have such a lab as part of their research complex. The lab, which actually cost $175,000 to fully equip, will serve scientists throughout the university and other institutions where such laboratory storage facilities are not readily available, said Glen Itzkowitz, SBU Medical Center's assistant dean for scientific operation.
The lab gives Stony Brook University scientists immediate access to the best and current models of disease and treatments and to work collaboratively on a global scale," Itzkowitz said.
About 30,000 Americans have the disease, Strasser said. Once a person is diagnosed, his or her life expectancy is typically between three and five years, he said, "but it's a debilitating disease that leaves them pretty much with no muscular movement whatsoever."
Alison Irving, 19, ran the third and fourth A Midwinter Night's Dream events and just completed her freshman year at Fordham University. Her school's proximity to her hometown enables her to stay active in the cause. "It's so crazy to think that we actually own a part of that building," Irving said. "And to go down and actually see the lab and have them show us what they're doing. … It's so cool. … We all turned to each other … we were like, 'There could be a new drug that comes out of our lab.'"
High school junior Blair Ingraham, 16, became involved with the committee last year. "It's really amazing," Ingraham said. "I never would have thought that this whole thing would have come to raising enough money to open our own lab named after A Midwinter Night's Dream."
This summer, she and a fellow Northport student will spend a week studying at the ALS Therapy Development Institute in Cambridge, Mass. Six other students will go to other research facilities at Columbia and Johns Hopkins universities and the new Stony Brook lab.
Aside from raising money and researching ALS on their own, members of the A Midwinter Night's Dream committee visit local ALS patients on weekends and conduct assembly programs in schools to teach others how they, too, can get involved in supporting research, Ingraham said.
"We work hard. But we all enjoy it," she said.
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