Staglin festival raises $3 million for mental health

By PAUL FRANSON
Register Correspondent

Rutherford vintners Shari and Garen Staglin hosted the 14th annual Staglin Family Music Festival for Mental Health on Saturday — tasting some of Napa Valley’s most sought-after wines, dancing to the Pointer Sisters and raising about $3 million to research mental health problems.

The Staglins also announced at the festival that the National Institute of Mental Health has awarded a $21 million grant to researchers to begin a large, multi-center study of mental processes that lead to problems such as schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease. The grant builds on research funded by earlier Staglin festivals.

The one-day festival started with lectures from leading scientists in the field of mental health research. Then guests entered Staglin Family Vineyard’s extensive wine cave for tastings of top-flight wines, including Harlan Estate Winery, Colgin Cellars, Pride Mountain Vineyards and Scarecrow Wine.

Chef Todd Humphries of St. Helena’s Martini House prepared the food served to guests as they wandered the caves.

The festival continued with a concert by the Pointer Sisters and an elaborate evening meal.

About 400 guests paid $750 to attend the lectures, tastings and concert. Some attendees paid $5,000 for a package that included those treats plus a lavish dinner prepared by Chef Mark Dommen of One Market restaurant in San Francisco.

The afternoon’s keynote talk was by Dr. Trevor W. Robbins, an expert in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Cambridge in England. He discussed various approaches researchers are taking to try to restore memory, reasoning and social interaction to those who suffer from mental disease or from side effects of treatments.

The big news of the day was revealed by Dr. Tyrone D. Cannon, who serves as the director of the Staglin Music Festival Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and is with the departments of psychology and psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA.

Cannon helped the Staglins announce the $21 million grant for the North American Prodromal Longitudinal Study, which backers hope will develop ways to identify the early symptoms of those likely to suffer from mental disease.

Cannon said the Staglin festival was an important catalyst for the large grant. “Funding from the Staglin Music Festival for Mental Health was absolutely instrumental in helping us secure this grant from the NIMH,” he said.

Garen Staglin, who is a venture capitalist as well as a vintner, said the NIMH grant is “another example of the importance of ‘venture philanthropy,’ our term for this vital private funding in an era of decreasing public research funding. We’ve always realized how important this type of unrestricted funding is to assist these doctors and scientists with their research, and we hope our success will inspire more to do the same.”

Dr. Huda Akil from the University of Michigan Department of Psychiatry, who moderated the afternoon forum, said, “It shouldn’t be needed, but funding from private sources helps trigger the public funding by demonstrating feasibility” of various lines of research.

In addition to the major NIMH grant, the Staglins announced that even more grant money has been awarded in 2008 to fund research based on studies initially supported by the music festival.

Among the researchers who previously received Staglin grants that helped raise additional funds was Dr. Akira Sawa of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. The $250,000 he received, which allowed him to make discoveries about two critical genes, spurred NIMH to award him $6 million to expand his research.

Likewise, the $250,000 the Staglin festival provided to Dr. Eva Anton at University of North Carolina spurred NIMH to provide Anton an additional $1 million grant.

Shari and Garen Staglin’s adult children Brandon and Shannon Staglin co-hosted the event.

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