Health science center gets gift of $20 million

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March 1, 2002, 11:11PM

Health science center gets gift of $20 million

By TODD ACKERMAN

Copyright 2002 Houston Chronicle Medical Writer

The Brown Foundation has given $20 million to the University of

Texas Health Science Center at Houston, the largest single donation ever made to

the school.

The donation will support UT's Institute of Molecular Medicine for

the Prevention of Human Diseases, a collection of centers that search for genes

and proteins involved in disease. The gift will help fund construction of a new

research building.

" This gift will help make possible the discovery of cures and

preventive therapies for the most widespread human diseases, " said UT-Houston

President Dr. T. Willerson. " It also brings us closer to the day when we

can build our new center. "

He said the institute, which employs 30 scientists, has outgrown two

floors of laboratory space it has leased at a building owned by Texas A & M

University since the institute's inception in early 1995.

In that time, he said, the institute has made key discoveries

involving genes or proteins associated with hypertension, diabetes, aneurysms

and aging.

The Brown gift brings to $37 million UT's New Frontiers campaign --

the school's most ambitious fund-raising effort ever -- which is seeking to

raise $200 million to build and equip the new IMM home and to recruit and

support world-class genetic and molecular scientists.

Plans call for the new center to be a $120 million,

200,000-square-foot, nine-floor building near the UT Medical School.

Willerson said he hopes to break ground on the building by late 2002

or early 2003 and that it will be open two years later.

In the early 1990s, UT-Houston raised $27.5 million to establish the

institute, which was initially directed by Dr. Hans Muller-Eberhard, who was

recruited from a tropical medicine center in Hamburg, Germany.

It is now directed by Dr. Ferid Murad, the Texas Medical Center's

only resident Nobel laureate.

The Brown Foundation, established by Houston civic leaders Herman

and Margarett Root Brown and and Alice Pratt Brown, has supported

UT-Houston since the early 1970s.

Previous donations helped establish the IMM; student scholarships

for the nursing school; and TexGen, a project collecting DNA samples from as

many as 50,000 cardiovascular and cancer patients each year in an attempt to

find the genes involved in cancer, heart disease and stroke.

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