Donor Spotlight: Bob Yant
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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.”