Estate gift builds Spurr family legacy, expands clinical trial opportunities for veterinary college
Scientific discoveries can change the landscape of veterinary medicine, but their true worth is never known until they cross the breach into real-life application for animals.
Clinical trials bridge that gap between the laboratory and the veterinary clinic.
The Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine has newly expanded capacity to carry out clinical trials of potential new treatments and diagnostic procedures for dogs and cats thanks to a $15 million estate gift from a groundbreaking Northern Virginia couple.
The Helen Dessin Spurr and Frank Arthur Spurr Jr. Endowed Research Fund for Domestic Canine and Feline Pets is a transformative gift that will enable novel treatments and diagnostic procedures to be applied in a compassionate, safe environment for the pets of owners who often have few other options and who can benefit through drastically reduced costs for treating their beloved animals.
“It is really important to do the bench work, to come up with different treatment options, but to translate that to what's going to help my pet right now, we need the clinical trials to be able to do that,” said Tanya LeRoith, director of the Veterinary Teaching Hospital.
What the Spurr gift will fund
The Spurr gift will support clinical trials at the Veterinary Teaching Hospital in a variety of ways, including:
- Seed grants for researchers
- A technician position to support clinical trials
- Personnel program support
This in turn will help increase the number of clinical trials being conducted, expanding the number of patients enrolled in clinical trials and allow for a broader range of clinical trials to be developed.
"Clinical trials often offer hope when other options have failed," said Robyn Fox, clinical trials coordinator. "They provide innovative treatments that might otherwise be unavailable."
Participating in clinical trials carries benefits for pet owners.
Clinical trials provide:
- Access to cutting-edge treatments before they're widely available
- Care from specialists and extra monitoring
- Potential financial help with hospital visits, surgery, or medications
- A chance to help future pets with similar conditions
"Clinical trials aren't just about finding cures," Fox said. "They're about giving hope when standard options have been exhausted and creating better treatments for future patients."
One example of long-running clinical trials at the Veterinary Teaching Hospital involve Cavalier King Charles spaniels. The dog breed often exhibits genetic traits that result in the increased occurrence of mitral valve disease and spinal cord malformation that leads to discomfort and insomnia. Ongoing clinical trials seek to compare mitral valve structure with that of other species and also to find ways to monitor and reduce pain from spinal abnormalities.
About the Spurrs
Helen Dessin Spurr was born in 1925 in Philadelphia and needed only 11 years to complete 12 years of schooling. She completed a degree at Temple University while employed full-time at Vick Chemical for four years.
She was hired by IBM and eventually worked there for 38 years, becoming a systems engineer. She retired in 1984, moving to a ridgetop near Winchester in Frederick County.
“One of Helen’s dreams was to make her property a wildlife refuge and bird sanctuary,” according to her obituary in the Winchester Star. “She accomplished this by continually making food, water, and shelter available.”
It was at the suggestion of a veterinarian who cared for her many dogs — miniature poodles, poodles, Doberman pinschers – that she was guided to Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine to offer an estate gift.
“Her pets were her children and if you didn’t understand that, you didn’t know Helen,” according to her obituary.
She adopted her last dog, a Doberman, at the age of 93. Spurr fought valiantly when diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in her late 90s, but died in 2023 at the age of 98.
The estate gift also honors her late husband, Frank Arthur Spurr Jr., who died in 2011 at the age of 87.
He lived a life marked by professional achievement, military service, and exceptional civic engagement.
He was born in 1923 in Washington, D.C. A graduate of George Washington University, he built a distinguished career in telecommunications within the Bell system, working for both AT&T in New York City and the C&P Telephone Companies. Spurr also served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War II and was instrumental in designing the first Washington, D.C., metropolitan area amateur radio repeater system.
Spurr held leadership roles in the American Red Cross and was active in numerous civic organizations. He was recognized as Citizen of the Year by the Winchester-Frederick County Chamber of Commerce in 1994.
With their generous estate gift, the Spurrs will not only bring about better outcomes for dogs and cats, but influence the discovery of treatments and cures for future pets as well as turn out future generations of veterinarians from the veterinary college.
“The Spurr gift can help us be on the cutting edge with our land-grant mission,” LeRoith said. “The research influences the teaching and the learning and the seeding of ideas for the next generation of academia and people who want to teach and do research.”
