William Opel

President, MBA, PhD
Huntington Medical Research Institutes

Dr. William Opel began his career with a decade of laboratory work studying radiation effects on the nervous system, and then became program director of a multi-institutional NIH-sponsored cell biology project. He then moved into administration. One of his first endeavors in this new role was to recruit a team of physicians and scientists for prostatic cancer research, who proceeded to develop and characterize what is now one of the most widely used prostate cell lines.

He combined three research groups affiliated with Huntington Memorial Hospital, a tertiary medical center and teaching hospital, to form the Huntington Medical Research Institutes. He also launched one of the country’s first clinical magnetic resonance programs, which has gone on to win great acclaim in imaging applications development and in clinical spectroscopy, as well as in training of radiologists and other clinicians.

Dr. Opel has organized HMRI into four main programs: neural engineering, brain mapping, molecular medicine and clinical research. With both NIH and industry support, the neural engineering program has developed significant clinical technology, including the hydrocephalus shunt and electrical stimulators for epilepsy and deafness. In addition to its MR advances, the brain mapping program has developed endoscopic stereotactic neurosurgical instrumentation and new methods for guiding epilepsy surgery with magnetoencephalography. For the molecular medicine program, Dr. Opel has recruited laboratory physician-scientists in cancer genetics, neural proteomics and tissue engineering. HMRI’s clinical research program in focused primarily on hepatitis B and C, and conducts phase 1, 2 and 3 trials.

Besides its affiliation with Huntington Hospital, where he works to encourage research projects by both medicine and surgery residents, as well as by the attending staff, Dr. Opel has worked to expand HMRI’s joint postdoctoral fellowship programs with Caltech. His strategy for HMRI is to continue to accommodate the research interests of physicians at Huntington Hospital, to build ongoing programs based on strengths of the laboratory research scientists recruited originally to support these physicians, and to initiate a few new enterprise projects that fit well with both HMRI’s expertise and emerging translational research opportunities.

In addition to his work at HMRI, Dr. Opel is past-president of the Pasadena City College Foundation and a board member of the Pasadena Bioscience Center and the California Biomedical Research Association.

(626) 397-5801