Leadership Team Member & Professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin, Dr. Ebert breaks down the challenges of finding effective therapies for ALS and how you can support the important work happening in her lab.
Mark Kandel began experiencing indicator symptoms of ALS in 2011; falling, difficulty walking, loss of balance, spasticity in his right leg, and foot drop. In October of 2014, at age 59, he received his ALS Diagnosis at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN.
Mark is now "66 years young" and attends the Froedtert Clinic working with Dr. Dominic Fee. Despite the abilities he’s lost, Mark’s focus is on the present and what he is still able to do to "keep fighting."
Thanks to the hard work of ALS advocates, Congress has passed the Accelerating Access to Critical Therapies (ACT) for ALS Act after a unanimous vote in the Senate. The bill previously passed in the House 423-2. The bill is expected to be signed into law by President Biden.
Executive Director John Hedstrom of The ALS Association Massachusetts Chapter offers a testimony to the Join Committee on Health Care Financing in support of in Support of H. 201 and S. 753, “An Act Advancing Health Care Research and Decision-Making Centered on Patients and People with Disabilities”. Read his statement on behalf of the Massachusetts ALS community here.
Accelerating Access to Critical Therapies (ACT) for ALS (H.R. 3537) was approved by a unanimous vote on Thursday, November 4 in the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health. Thanks to everyone within the ALS community who has advocated for passage and who has worked on Capitol Hill to help make this important step happen. The strong bipartisan support for this bill means smooth sailing as the bill goes to the full House Energy and Commerce Committee and then the full House for approval.
Avi works closely with The ALS Association, fundraising to ensure all people living with ALS have access to effective treatments and care. Almost completely paralyzed and unable to speak, he communicates by typing using small head movements. “My campaign to help find treatments and a cure is done primarily through a computer,” he says, “but my life is filled with joy, and I am living with ALS.”
Unlike most Medicare recipients who need extensive home care and rehabilitative services, people with ALS do not improve, and the intensity of their service needs increase over time. That means standard Medicare cost control approaches don’t work well. I will discuss two examples.
There is a lot to do, and this grounded focus of making ALS livable helps us hold everyone—ourselves, the FDA, and the research community—accountable to real impacts on real people with ALS and the time it takes to deliver those impacts. This week has been a big step forward for the ALS community, and we will continue urgently working to keep the momentum going.
Thanks to the tireless efforts of ALS advocates across the country, the House included many of our aggressive requests for new and increased investments in research to find treatments and a cure, slow symptom progression, reduce the number of new cases, and increase the length and quality of life for every American living with ALS.
ALS advocates are pursuing an aggressive set of public policy priorities for people living with ALS and their families. These priorities include increased federal funding for ALS research, creating new pathways for expedited approval of promising treatments including the Promising Pathway Act and ACT for ALS, making permanent expanded access to telehealth, and increasing access to high-quality health care and veteran's benefits.