It’s ALS Awareness Month, and The ALS Association remains steadfastly committed to funding the most hopeful research around the world that could lead to effective treatments and a cure for ALS.
Researchers funded by The ALS Association, through donations from the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, discovered new evidence on the role that mutant TDP-43 plays in development and progression of the disease. This important work sheds light on novel aspects of TDP-43 biology and provides valuable tools to gain insight into early stages of ALS disease progression and could lead to the development of new therapies.
The ALS Association is hosting ALS Community Workshop: Developing Drugs for Treatment, Guidance for Industry on July 12 in Washington, D.C., and the entire ALS community is invited. The goal of the workshop will be to provide targeted feedback and information to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from people with ALS, caregivers, and stakeholders to inform revisions of the FDA’s Draft Guidance on ALS Drug Development.
To make cell characteristics visible to the human eye, even under a microscope, scientists normally use chemicals that can kill the very cells they want to observe. Dr. Steven Finkbeiner, director and senior investigator at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco (pictured above), recently teamed with computer scientists at Google for a groundbreaking new study funded by The ALS Association Neuro Collaborative through ALS Ice Bucket Challenge donations.
Researchers at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, funded by The ALS Association with ALS Ice Bucket Challenge donations, are dedicated to finding unique avenues for treating ALS. Using animal models, they transplanted specially engineered neural cells into the motor cortex of the brain, the area responsible for muscle movement.
The ALS Association is committed to helping improve clinical trial design, in order to increase trial efficiency that will more quickly lead to effective therapeutics. We awarded Dr. David Ennist and colleagues at Origent Data Sciences, Inc. two grants to support research exploring how machine learning algorithms, a type of computational tool, can optimize clinical trial design. Dr. Ennist’s work, recently published in the journal Annals of Clinical Trial and Translational Neurology, looks closely at optimizing patient randomization into clinical trials.
We recently sat down with Dr. Carlos Castañeda, assistant professor of biology and chemistry at Syracuse University. Thanks to funding from the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, The ALS Association has funded Dr. Castañeda twice through our global research program, which supported this work.
Research funded with donations from the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge recently uncovered evidence that promoting an increase in a specific immune cell in the brain and spinal cord of a mouse with ALS was associated with increased motor function, pointing to a potential treatment in the future.
Dr. Gene Yeo from the University of California San Diego recently published a paper in the journal Cell, describing his important work uncovering the role of stress granules (SGs) in ALS. His research is supported by The ALS Association Investigator-Initiated Grant program, with donations from the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. We sat down with Dr. Yeo to hear how he and his team identified SG components that they found vary by stress and cell-type.