Reading Time: 4 minutes At this time of year, it’s always good to look back on the previous year to see just how far we’ve really come. We’re pleased to say that 2012 was full of progress being made in the world of MND research and we hope that the speed and number of exciting findings being announced continues…
Reading Time: 4 minutes New exciting findings announced today provide the first insight into the structure and function of a repeated six letter genetic sequence in an MND gene called C9ORF72. Understanding the function of C9ORF72, and how it could go wrong to cause MND, could assist researchers in the future to identify potential treatments that target the disease.…
Reading Time: 2 minutes Many congratulations to Rosa Rademakers from Mayo Clinic Florida USA, winner of this year’s Paulo Gontijo Young Investigator award. She won the award for her work on co-discovering the gene defect in C9orf72. As part of her prize (in addition to a medal and a cheque to continue her work) she gave an overview of…
Reading Time: 4 minutes Dr Johnathan Cooper-Knock from the Sheffield Institute for Translational Neuroscience (SITraN) has been awarded with the fifth Medical Research Council (MRC)/MND Association Lady Edith Wolfson Clinical Research Fellowship. Through his three-year fellowship, Dr Cooper-Knock will use the MND Association’s DNA bank to study how recently discovered mistakes (known as mutations) in a gene called C9ORF72…
Reading Time: < 1 minute Attending a three day scientific meeting is quite an intense experience, my brain has been working hard and by this morning, there were leaks of stress all over the place! So in some ways it was quite a relief to walk into the final session of the meeting this afternoon, but in other ways quite…
Reading Time: 3 minutes It’s taken a huge international collaboration, including 3 MND Association-funded scientists, to discover a genetic mistake that appears to cause almost 40% of cases of familial (inherited) MND – that’s nearly twice as many as are caused by mutations in the SOD1 gene and more than three times as many as are caused by TDP-43 and…
