Brain health in Alberta gets $10 million boost

Two years after Stan and Marge Owerko gifted the Alberta Childrens Hospital Foundation with $5 million for brain-related health, the couple returned to the hospital with an even bigger donation.

On Monday, the Owerko family announced a donation of an additional $10 million to support brain health, bringing the couples total investment since 2012 to help children with brain injury and illness to $15 million.

The second donation was celebrated on Monday in a hospital conference room packed with Owerkos Petrogas Energy Corps colleagues and friends, medical staff and children who have been patients at the hospital.

The funds will benefit children across the province, and potentially around the world, who are affected by brain-related health conditions including traumatic brain injury, autism, stroke, epilepsy, anxiety, depression and learning disabilities, said Dr. Jong Rho, division head of pediatric neurology at the Alberta Childrens Hospital and a professor at the University of Calgary.

We now have the opportunity of really creating an innovative landscape to develop new knowledge and therapies, not just for the patients here in Calgary or Alberta, but actually lead the rest of the country and the world. We plan on exporting that knowledge and taking a world leadership role in neurodevelopmental disorders and pediatric brain and mental health, Rho said.

A portion of the $10 million donation will go to creating a new research space that will provide greater opportunity for researchers to collaborate and innovate, called the Owerko Centre at the Alberta Childrens Hospital Research Institute.

Rho said the new funds will allow for improvements in the experience of patients families and a big boost to research including up to six more faculty members who will come from across Canada and elsewhere.

We have dozens of clinical researchers who are world-class leaders in their areas of developmental neurosciences. Were going to be bringing them together and were going to be recruiting more, he said.

Stan Owerko said during the past two years he and his wife have seen their initial donation achieve incredible success in a short period of time, thus spurring the couple to elevate their support.

Marge and I are keenly interested in seeing the frontiers pushed back in brain health treatment and research especially in ADHD, autism, epilepsy, concussion, stroke. All of these areas require intensive research dealing with brain disorders and brain health, he said.

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Brain health in Alberta gets $10 million boost