ABOUT

Our daughter, Grace, was diagnosed with autoimmune encephalitis in November of 2021. Grace has what is called seronegative autoimmune encephalitis, which means we do not know which antibodies in her brain are being attacked. Her neurologist, Dr. Benjamin Greenberg, has an eloquent analogy to explain this. He says, “Think of the galaxy. We have names for about one hundred stars, but there are hundreds of thousands of stars in the galaxy that have not been discovered.”

The Grace Fund aims to raise awareness and money for autoimmune research. An autoimmune disease is any disease that occurs when the body’s natural defense system can’t tell the difference between its own cells and foreign cells, causing the body to attack normal cells mistakenly. More than eighty types of autoimmune diseases exist and affect a wide range of body parts. We hope that in the next five years, children showing symptoms like Grace will be more easily identified as having encephalitis, and these antibodies will help create cures and treatments. These cures and treatments will be for encephalitis and potentially other autoim- mune diseases such as multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes, lupus, celiac disease, and rheumatoid arthritis.