Donor Spotlight: Bob Yant

Bob Yant arrived at the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation’s first-ever Spinal Cord Injury Investor Symposium in June of 2023 on the heels of a rough spring. An unexpected illness had landed him in the hospital for a stretch, and he was only just regaining his strength. But Yant rallied for the event, ready to hear more about Reeve’s ambitious new plans to supercharge spinal cord injury treatments.

His determination wasn’t a surprise. For more than forty years, Yant’s relentless quest to fund spinal cord injury research has galvanized the field and provided critical support for countless labs and patient-driven non-profit organizations – including the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation.

At the symposium, Yant felt energized. He saw old friends and watched scientists and community members network with the investors and biotech companies vital to translating treatments. But it was a presentation about Reeve’s efforts to create a testing framework designed for accelerated innovation that captured his attention.

A month later, Yant – recharged and back to business pushing the field forward – donated $100,000 to Reeve for the development of STRIVE (Standardized Testing Research InVivo Endeavor), a more nimble, standardized model for testing potential therapeutics.

“Setting up these structures will help move things along a lot more quickly,” Yant says. “And then, when the time comes that you’ve got something that looks like it really is going to work, a way of rocketing that up to the point where a biotech company or somebody else will be interested in developing a treatment for human beings.”

Yant’s enthusiasm for the initiative, spearheaded by Reeve’s Chief Scientific Officer Marco Baptista, is just one example of his longtime support for the Reeve Foundation. He joined the Foundation’s Board in 1982, in its earliest days as the American Paralysis Association (APA), and served through 2011. Then, and now, his expansive outreach has helped fuel Reeve’s research efforts and introduced its quality-of-life resources to families across the country affected by injuries.

“Bob’s support has been vital to our work,” says Reeve President and CEO Maggie Goldberg. “His lifelong dedication to driving progress in spinal cord injury treatment is not only an inspiration – it has made a difference in what is possible.”

Yant sustained a C5 spinal cord injury in a diving accident in 1981. Until that moment, he’d been in the midst of what felt like an ideal life: he was living at the beach in southern California with friends, had recently earned his pilot’s license and was steadily building a successful career in real estate.

“In a way, it was one of the best times in my life,” he says. “That all changed with my SCI. I gave up real estate and started thinking about ‘What’s going on in research?’ and ‘How can I raise money for that research?’”

But when Yant peppered his doctors with questions about treatments, they had little to recommend. So, he started his own search, reaching out to others with injuries to see what might be done to boost the field.

He resolved to raise $25,000 for promising research, did just that, and then kept going. (These days that total is closer to $20 million – and counting.) He taught himself to understand the research itself, scouring medical journals, emailing labs for updates, and listening to the neuroscientists on the scientific advisory board of the APA. And he often hit the road, traveling from California to Boston to meet and learn from the scientists behind the microscopes.

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In connecting families and donors with labs and SCI organizations like Reeve, Yant wove a critical web of support for the growing field. Anyone expressing the slightest interest in the mission was fair game for his pitch.

“If I could get them interested in SCI research, then I was kind of like a dog with a bone,” he says. “I would grab on and just not let go.”

Along the way, Yant built a full life for himself, too. He got married, had a daughter, and became a successful businessman whose companies, Research Medical and Cure Medical, donated a portion of their profits to SCI research. Research Medical staffed its ranks with people living with disabilities.

In 2020, Yant merged his fundraising skills with the research insights he’d gained over so many years, helping to launch Axonis Therapeutics, a biotech startup now pursuing treatments for neurological disorders, including paralysis. Axonis’ groundbreaking work thrills Yant, and is currently among the inaugural group of companies funded by SCI Ventures, a first-of-its-kind venture philanthropy fund co-founded by the Reeve Foundation.

“I’m living in a dream,” Yant says. “I have to pinch myself every day to think about when I started this, and where we are now.”

But until the long-awaited therapies arrive, Yant’s efforts will not stop. He recently cofounded a new company – SCIgenis, with the intention of focusing on regenerating nerves in the spinal cord. He also continues to seed innovative initiatives across the country and internationally, closely monitoring the work being done throughout the field, including by Baptista, who joined Reeve in 2022 after a decade with the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.

“We’re fortunate to have someone like him,” Yant says. “He moved the needle in the Parkinson’s field. He made a big difference there, so I’m really pleased that he came into this field.”

More than forty years after the injury that changed his life, Yant does not pretend that it has been easy. But he remains a firm believer in the potential for progress. And lately, he’s feeling optimistic that the answers he’s worked toward for decades are finally within reach.

A David Hockney poster of a man swimming in a pool hangs on the wall in Yant’s California home. Years ago, he cut the image into nine pieces, creating a mosaic so that the swimmer glides downward in the water.

“I tell people that when I think there’s a cure for SCI, I’m going to change the mosaic and the guy’s not going to be swimming down; he’s going to be swimming up,” he says. “I haven’t done it yet but we’re getting really close.”