A gift from the couple Stuart McClure and Tusdi Vopat is establishing an endowed chair for integrative health at Rady Children’s Health Orange County.
The co-founder of Cylance Inc., the Irvine-based cybersecurity firm he sold for $1.5 billion, and his wife, president of the couple’s Clavis Foundation, made a gift of an undisclosed amount to create the Clavis Foundation Chair for Wellness—the first endowed chair in Rady’s 62-year history. It will focus on integrative health encompassing everything from mental health to nutritional testing for the pediatric population.
Vopat told the Business Journal that most mental health and wellness services are geared toward adults, with very little focus on “pediatric integrative health.” This new foundation aims to fill the “gap in healthcare facilities.”
“I think this (foundation) puts CHOC in a good position to provide something that nobody else is providing,” said Vopat, referring to Children’s Hospital of Orange County in Orange.
Dr. Michael Weiss was named the inaugural Clavis Foundation Chair for Wellness and plans to expand the hospital’s existing wellness efforts, including the launch of an integrative medicine program.
“We as physicians are very reactive. We’re good at sitting in our offices and waiting for sick people to come and visit us, but that’s not really the paradigm that we want to focus on,” Weiss said at a Jan. 9 event announcing the gift and endowed chair. “This chair, this whole program, is about shifting the paradigm into proactivity and prevention.”
Whole-Person Care
Vopat has been on the CHOC Foundation board for six years.
Prior to joining the board, she was on its wellness committee.
“We tried to get that going, but then that got deprioritized—as it should have been, considering all of the other things that were very important at the time,” Vopat said.
Vopat said she’s personally passionate about integrative medicine, which looks at health as a whole and focuses on wellness, prevention and lifestyle.
“We’re all finding that mental health is really connected to our physical health, so you can’t address one without the other,” Vopat said.
Once Vopat joined the board, she met Douglas Corbin, who was the chief development officer at CHOC Foundation at the time and “really understood (her) passion,” eventually developing what became the current program.
“It has changed a bit from the original vision, but I think it’s better,” Vopat said.
Vopat and McClure began conversations with Weiss about an endowed chair around four years ago.
Weiss was a practicing pediatrician for 22 years before becoming vice president of population health at Rady. He also oversees the clinical program for CHOC Health Alliance, which provides care to more than 140,000 children across the region.
“We couldn’t have hand-picked a better person,” McClure said.
In his new inaugural chair position, Weiss will help address the root causes of illness while supporting proactive, preventive care, earlier intervention and improved access to a broad range of evidence-based care, including integrative medicine.
“We can be the healthiest county in America, but if we don’t have productive members of society moving out of their childhood into adulthood, we’ve failed, and that’s what this is all about,” Weiss said.
Prevention is Key
Vopat and McClure started the Clavis Foundation in 2020 to search for innovative ways to solve the most challenging problems in health, education and the environment through prevention.
The idea for the foundation’s name, which means ‘key’ in Latin, came about during a family trip.
“Prevention is the key and that’s the name of the foundation,” McClure said.
The Clavis Foundation has supported other initiatives at Rady, formerly known as CHOC, prior to the endowment gift. They made their first gift to the hospital during the pandemic to create a fund for impacted families.
“That relief fund we put together for Rady addressed not just the healthcare costs, but more importantly, the general sort of living costs that occurred when parents were out of work or impacted negatively due to COVID and related illnesses for their children,” Vopat said.
Recipients of the fund included parents facing job losses or reductions in work hours, families at risk of eviction and households with newborns in need of medical services.
The fund provided up to $3,000 in direct financial support to more than 76 families, according to Rady.
The Clavis Foundation also helped support Rady’s WellSpace initiative, which launched in 2019.
Rady partnered with the Orange County Department of Education and Design with Purpose, a Laguna Beach nonprofit, to create “safe, dedicated areas in schools that support the mental and emotional health of students.”
The initiative aims to have a WellSpace in every school across Orange County’s 28 districts.
Outside of its work with Rady, Vopat and McClure’s family foundation is working with Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian on a nerve stimulator for gastrointestinal health.
Music for Pediatric Mental Health
Pediatric mental health is a big focus for Cylance founder Stuart McClure and his wife, Tusdi Vopat.
It’s a healthcare issue that’s growing in prevalence in and outside of Orange County.
Statistics show that 40% of high school students report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness with 22% seriously considering suicide, yet more than half of youth with major depression symptoms reportedly do not receive any mental health treatment.
That’s why the couple’s Clavis Foundation is involved with Laguna Beach nonprofit Omada Foundation for Children, which is dedicated to helping pediatric hospitals better serve the mental health needs of children and adolescents across the U.S.
The Laguna Beach-based nonprofit was founded in 2023 by longtime business leaders Douglas Corbin and Cary Hyden, who spent years working together at Children’s Hospital of Orange County, now named Rady Children’s Health after its merger with Rady Children’s Hospital San Diego.
Clavis has been involved with Omada from the start and made a “sizeable” donation to the organization with plans to invest more as it gets closer to holding its first major event, according to Vopat.
Omada on April 25 plans to hold a private fundraising concert at MGM Music Hall at Fenway Park in Boston. The three-time Grammy Award-winning Zac Brown Band will be performing.
Proceeds will help fund future fundraising events, pediatric hospital-led pilot programs, and other key initiatives.
—Yuika Yoshida
McClure’s Next Venture is Health Tech
Stuart McClure, who has 30 years of experience in cybersecurity, is known to have pioneered the use of AI and machine learning to proactively prevent cyberattacks rather than just detect them.
Since selling Cylance to Canada-based BlackBerry Ltd. for $1.5 billion in 2019, McClure has been involved in other tech companies.
He joined Qwiet AI as CEO in 2022. The San Jose-based firm, previously known as ShiftLeft, aims to prevent cyberattacks by identifying vulnerabilities in code and was acquired by Harness for an undisclosed amount last September.
McClure’s latest venture is called Wethos AI.
The Newport Beach-based startup, founded in 2023, uses artificial intelligence to generate insights into employees’ work habits and behaviors, then provides suggestions to improve performance.
It’s one of the first companies to come out of McClure’s Newport Beach business incubator and accelerator, NumberOneAI, founded in 2021, and which has raised approximately $13 million to date for companies working with AI and machine learning.
McClure said that the company’s been in “heavy R&D mode” for the last two and a half years.
“We’re now starting to see the results of all that and getting it into the market,” McClure said.
He’s now turning his attention to healthcare, hinting at a new personalized health tech company he’s founded that’s in the late stages of development and preparing to launch later this year.
McClure explained that the company uses AI to build a profile of a person made up of their symptoms, genetics and family history to target any healthcare goal, from preventing cancer recurrence to something as simple as improving sleep.
One of the biggest challenges with AI in these contexts is that it has no memory, according to McClure.
“So of course, it hallucinates and there are errors, but we’re fixing and resolving all of those,” McClure said.
The inspiration behind the new company was a breast cancer diagnosis for McClure’s wife, Tusdi Vopat, and her experience with having to see several specialized providers.
“This is really going to turn the tables on the way that we look at health,” Vopat said. “It’s really about personalized, whole person health and how you can make changes specific to you.”
—Yuika Yoshida
