Sandy Killion, center, with her sons Cooper Killion, and his wife Ashley Killion, left, and David Killion, and his wife Katy, right.A transformational endowed gift from a Birmingham family will sustain and expand vital research and education at the University of Alabama at Birmingham focused on Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.
The Killion family of Birmingham has given a $10 million gift to UAB to create the Wayne Killion Endowment for the Center for Neurodegeneration and Experimental Therapeutics and to rename the center the Killion Center for Neurodegeneration and Experimental Therapeutics at the UAB Marnix E. Heersink School of Medicine.
The gift honors three generations of Killions who suffered from different neurodegenerative diseases.
The center was founded in 2007 to translate ideas from UAB laboratories to novel human therapies for patients living with neurodegenerative diseases. Its leaders say the Killions’ gift will have a long-term impact by fueling research and scientific training for many years to come in this growing field of medicine.
“This gift will have a permanent impact on neurodegenerative diseases,” said David Standaert, M.D., Ph.D., the John N. Whitaker Professor and chair of the UAB Department of Neurology, founding director of the center, and a renowned expert in Parkinson’s disease.
“We are endowing all the funds from this gift because we want to maximize the long-term impact. It’s going to fuel both research and education by training future generations of scientists, which is very important,” Standaert said. “In some ways, training lasts longer than any single research project. One research project hopefully moves us toward progress. But training a scientist will have a 40- or 50-year impact.”
Sandy Killion attributes the ability to give this gift to UAB to her in-laws, Christine and Wayne Killion Sr. Her father-in-law was president and an owner of industrial insulation company Shook & Fletcher for many years. The company has expanded to become Shook & Fletcher Services, which has numerous industrial contractor affiliates, including Vulcan Industrial Contractors, Vesta Industrial Contractors, and Shook & Fletcher Supply. Today, the companies are led by Sandy and her sons David and Cooper Killion.
Her father-in-law suffered from Alzheimer’s and died in 2013. Her husband, Wayne Killion Jr., M.D., was a respected local physician and later took over the family business from his father as president and CEO. He was diagnosed in 2019 with corticobasal degeneration and passed away in 2022. Before Wayne Jr.’s death, their son Wayne Killion III was diagnosed with ALS and passed away in 2024, cutting short a brilliant legal career.
During both of their lifetimes, the family established separate endowed funds at UAB to support memory disorders and behavioral neurology under David Geldmacher, M.D., and ALS research under Peter King, M.D. The $10 million gift includes these funds.
“While my husband was in clinical care, he understood that the research piece was so important,” Killion said. “With what we are facing with these diseases, our family wants to do everything possible to support the immense need for research.”
“My father-in-law was a very generous man and would be very proud of the legacy he was able to create,” Killion said. “My hope is that combining the amount will have a bigger impact on researching neurodegenerative diseases. Maybe someday, somehow, they are going to figure out a way to prevent, to cure and to increase quality of life for patients, because these diseases are horrible.”
Killion says genome mapping the family revealed no connection between the three separate diseases. But the neurodegenerative similarity warrants the need for expanded research.
“To have this rare form of dementia and ALS, there has to be a connection somewhere out there,” Killion said. “When Dr. Roberson and Dr. Standaert explained to us the focus of CNET, it became clear that this effort focusing on research across the spectrum of neurodegenerative diseases was one we would wholeheartedly support.”
Finding the connection is why the center was established nearly 20 years ago — and why Standaert was recruited from Harvard University to oversee it.
“We felt that working on these four major areas together would lead to more progress than working on each separately,” he said. “We didn’t build just a Parkinson’s disease research center. We built an integrated neurodegenerative disease center because we thought Parkinson’s researchers would benefit from working daily with people working on Alzheimer’s, ALS and Huntington’s. There is shared biology, shared knowledge, shared approaches and shared methods. We’ve seen a lot of things happen that would not have happened if these scientists were working separately.”
Today, the Killion Center is led by Erik Roberson, M.D., Ph.D., who holds the Rebecca Gale–Heersink Endowed Chair and specializes in Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia, while Standaert continues to play an active role.
“My father-in-law was a very generous man and would be very proud of the legacy he was able to create,” Killion said. “My hope is that combining the amount will have a bigger impact on researching neurodegenerative diseases. Maybe someday, somehow, they are going to figure out a way to prevent, to cure and to increase quality of life for patients, because these diseases are horrible.”
Currently, the center employs 19 principal investigators who are training around 30 doctoral students. The number of scientists has steadily grown, Roberson says, and this gift will help continue that progress and keep the center on the cutting edge of the field.
Work at the center has already led to the development of new therapies for neurodegenerative diseases. In Parkinson’s disease, center investigators have discovered how immune signaling contributes to the disease. This work has enabled the development of new anti-inflammatory treatments for Parkinson’s that are now being tested in clinical trials at UAB and other sites around the world.
“This kind of research requires a lot of sophisticated equipment — for example, million-dollar microscopes to capture the most high-resolution images of a synapse between two neurons,” Roberson said. “Obtaining that equipment is expensive, maintaining it is expensive, and every 10 years or so, you’ve got to upgrade it because it either wears out or becomes obsolete in terms of technology.”
And with the center’s growth will come the training of more scientists with the expertise to make impactful discoveries — all making it a richer intellectual environment that attracts additional funding. Killion says that is why she wanted the endowed funds to be unrestricted, allowing the center to allocate funds to its areas of greatest need and opportunity. The endowment will provide a reliable stream of income.
“While my husband was in clinical care, he understood that the research piece was so important,” Killion said. “With what we are facing with these diseases, our family wants to do everything possible to support the immense need for research.”