The Laura Fund drives daring and innovative Multiple Sclerosis research.
The Laura Fund was established in 2004 by Dan and Bonnie Wieden in honor of their daughter, Laura, who lives with a form of relapsing-remitting form of Multiple Sclerosis. The Fund, initially focused on research at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), has since expanded to global operations with a goal to search every corner of the globe for daring innovation to find a cure for MS.
Our Mission
The Laura Fund empowers researchers to embrace innovation and immediacy in their quest for an MS cure.
“Access to funds must never be the barrier to finding a cure for MS.”
The Laura Fund actively seeks researchers to pursue daring innovation in all corners of the world, across all realms of possibility—pharmaceuticals, technology, and alternative medicine. We promote cross-disciplinary collaborations between scientists, physicians, and pharmacology and fund advanced laboratory equipment that enables faster research.
Our Mantra
“There’s patient time, and there’s research time. The patient clock [is spinning fast], and the research clock is plodding along.”
The Laura Fund seeks projects where funding can make an immediate impact. We want to support ongoing experimental research where new equipment, additional staff, or a new path can be explored but needs additional funding.
We don’t just fund traditional research—we want to find the wildcards, those crazy moonshots in medical research, technology, and any emerging idea that could lead to a breakthrough in our quest for an MS cure.
At the Laura Fund, we want to find and fund results… NOW.
Funding
“We want scientists to pursue their creative ideas and have the freedom to experiment. The way research is funded today, that freedom has to come in the form of community support.”
We want new ideas and innovation to lead us to find a cure for MS. We won’t settle for just another drug that does a better job of managing or slowing down symptoms.
For the past 20 years, we’ve been hard at work funding projects at OHSU, but today, we are committed to expanding our reach to all corners of the globe. Here’s what we’ve done so far.