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"Fight for Mike" Targets Rare Neurodegenerative Disease
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Mike Homer
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When longtime Silicon Valley executive Mike Homer was diagnosed last May with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) – a rare and deadly neurodegenerative disorder – he decided to try to beat the odds. Out of his struggle came a fundraising campaign, "Fight for Mike," that holds promise of helping other sufferers and would-be sufferers of the brain-wasting disease, which kills about 90 percent of patients within one year of symptom onset.
Spearheaded by Homer, his wife Kristina and two of his closest Silicon Valley friends, Ron Conway and Bill Campbell, the campaign will raise money to support research and treatments targeting CJD. Most of the campaign proceeds will benefit UCSF - home to the world's leading team of scientists and physicians working to understand and conquer the disorder. Thanks to the incoming support, which to date totals $5 million, UCSF will be able to augment its research efforts, as well as expand and accelerate clinical trials.
The UCSF team is led by Stanley Prusiner, MD, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1997 for discovering the abnormally shaped protein, known as a prion, that causes a number of rare human and animal brain diseases, including CJD and "mad cow" disease in cattle. Prusiner's lab later found that quinacrine, once used to treat malaria, kills prions in mouse cells in the culture dish. Their discovery cleared the way for human clinical trials involving the drug. Pruisner's team is now working on improving quinacrine's effectiveness, expanding the trials, and identifying new treatments.
Prusiner's findings also have implications for other neurodegenerative diseases – including Alzheimer's – which are now known to result from misshapen or misprocessed proteins. Bruce Miller, MD, director of the UCSF Memory and Aging Center, says that if CJD is conquered, effective drug strategies for these other diseases may follow.
Homer says that he is grateful for the outpouring of support, which he hopes will not only improve his own outlook, but "help a lot of other people."
"I can't even imagine how I can thank everybody," he says.
"Fight for Mike" video segment
Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) Frequently Asked Questions
Give online to "Fight for Mike"
For more information on supporting "Fight for Mike," contact Julie Shafer at 415/722-6285 or jshafer@ind.ucsf.edu.
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