The Move To Move Continues
In the winter of 2010 the RIRC announced the launching of the Corticospinal Tract PTEN Regeneration Project by Dr. Zhigang He from the Children's Hospital, Harvard and Dr. Oswald Steward at the Reeve-Irvine Research Center, UCI. In this study, Drs. He and Steward devised a way to induce regeneration of a pathway that controls voluntary motor function after spinal cord injury. This is accomplished by blocking a naturally occurring human enzyme known at PTEN which enables unprecedented nerve regeneration. This study showed clearly that shutting off PTEN allows robust regeneration of the corticospinal tract, previously considered the most difficuIt tract to regenerate.
After learning of these advances the Wentz family decided to establish the “Z Fund” named after Zack Wentz who suffered a spinal cord injury at the age of 15 at a ski resort when the family was on vacation. The Wentz family described the following years as an emotional roller coaster and Zack was faced with learning to readjust his life from being a very active teenager to one who faced the challenges of living with paralysis from the chest down. The purpose of the Z Fund was to raise money for SCI research and the CST PTEN Regeneration project and raised close to $120,000 at Stanford University in 2010. In 2011 the Wentz family pulled together another event they called the “Move to Move” that raised over $100,000. These events were key in providing the funding to carry out critical studies that generated preliminary data for two NIH grants to Drs. He and Steward which allowed for an additional 5 years of research and yielded well over 1.5 million in research funding that otherwise would not have been possible.
Since the Z Fund was established in 2010, Zack worked at the Riekes Center for Human Enhancement as a piano teacher, teaching a wide variety of students how to play the piano by ear, just as he taught himself how to play the piano! Simultaneously he worked at a Mexican restaurant, as well as at a summer camp three consecutive summers.
He received word that he was accepted to the University of Southern California (USC), and was fortunate enough to receive a “Swim With Mike Scholarship”, a scholarship dedicated to providing financial resources for physically challenged athletes.
In 2014, Zack pledged and ultimately became an active member of Delta Omicron Zeta, USC's leadership fraternity. He worked in the USC Athletic Department as an intern assisting in the development of the Heritage Association, an organization whose goal is to create a unified community among USC student-athletes and student-athlete alumni through philanthropy.
In 2015, Zack applied for the Lime Connect Fellowship program, to which he was ultimately selected as one of twenty fellows to participate in a highly competitive leadership and development program in New York City for students with disabilities. Additionally, Zack founded USC's 1st Annual Wheelchair Basketball Tournament, an idea that he developed and included in his application to USC. The tournament has been a wild success each of its first two years, including participation from over 100 USC students, as well as participation from USC's Men's and Women's Basketball Teams. Zack has already started preparing for the 3rd annual WBT this upcoming spring!
In the spring of 2016, Zack went through a grueling pledge process that culminated with his becoming a Trojan Knight, USC's guardians of tradition. “The Three Pillars of our Trojan Knights organization are Brotherhood, Philanthropy, and Spirit. We are the guys who are front row at every football and basketball game with our chests painted. And we are the guys who put on numerous philanthropy events around the community, including USC's biggest philanthropy: the big “Swim with Mike” event in April”.
In the summer of 2016, Zach got a job as a social media and campus ambassador for a sports news company called The Lead Sports. He also started volunteering with Dharma Rescue, a volunteer organization dedicated to rescuing disabled dogs and training them to become therapy dogs. Finally, this past fall semester, Zack inspired a position within USC's Undergraduate Student Government and has held that position since. He serves as the Disability/Accessibility Issues Advisor on USG's Board of Advisors. This position has had countless initiatives regarding how to make USC a more accessible place, and holding this position within USC's Undergraduate Student Government has expanded Zack's resources immensely, which has been conducive to more productivity with his initiatives. These initiatives range from improving accessibility (which covers all sorts of disabilities) in dining halls, dorms, and classrooms, to being a liaison and meeting with architects working on renovations for various USC sporting venues.
Zack did not let his challenges slow him down and neither have the research teams working on the CST PTEN Regeneration project. Since the initial launch of this project, the Steward Lab published papers in 2014 and 2015 showing that CST regeneration was accompanied by recovery of motor function. And the latest new breakthrough discussed in a recent issue of our Spinal Connections that discusses collaborator Dr. Kai Liu's first author article in Nature Neuroscience showing that it is possible to induce CST regeneration in a chronic setting! (see cover story of Summer 2015). This is the most promising finding in chronic regeneration that we have seen to date and we are all very excited about the future of this project.
We would like to congratulate Zack Wentz on his amazing accomplishments despite challenges that faced him, and thank the Wentz Family for showing that perseverance pays off! There is so much promise in the future of research that could help Zack and many others who could benefit from potential therapies stemming from research conducted at the RIRC. All of us are grateful to the many private gifts we receive that help propel these important projects forward.
If you are interested in supporting this project or the RIRC please consider giving online by reeve.uci.edu/give or contact Tania Jope by phone: (949) 824-5925 or email: tania.jope@uci.edu
