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 at this pace in 2013.
In 2012, 1,466 scientific papers were published in MND, which is 200 more than the previous year, demonstrating the energy and speed at which progress is being made.
Twitter: If you follow us on Twitter, then we’d like to take this opportunity to thank you for your re-tweets and mentions throughout 2012 to help raise awareness of MND and to keep your friends and family up-to-date with our exciting news. We managed to double our followers in 2012 because of your continued support!
News stories:
We wrote over 30 blog articles in 2012 to take you behind the scenes of MND research. These were viewed over 36,000 times with visitors coming from 126 countries. Here’s an over of a few of the findings we wrote about in 2012:
Clinical trials
At the start of the year, we heard some exciting news that a drug called Cogane produced some encouraging results in an MND Association funded study. A few weeks ago we heard an update that the drug company who owns Cogane called Phytopharm are moving toward a clinical trial and are currently securing funding and support for this. This could take a number of months before final plans are made but it’s positive to see that MND Association funding has led to this exciting development!
It was also positive to hear some encouraging NP001 clinical trial results for MND, which is leading toward a larger Phase III study to test the effectiveness of this drug in MND in America this year.
Angiogenin findings advance our understanding of MND
In June, we heard that Irish Angiogenin research lead to promising results. One finding was related to a new biological finding of the vital role that angiogenin plays and the second expands on this work and led to the testing of angiogenin in mice that model MND. Later on in the year, we also heard how University of Bath research showed how angiogenin affects motor neurone survival.
New genes
We also heard about some exciting findings in understanding how genes can influence survival and cause MND for some people. In July, Profilin1 was identified as a cause of MND. In our blog, we explained that Profilin 1 has a role in holding the shape of the cell through the cells scaffolding – called the cytoskeleton. We then heard about another gene called EPHA4 which influences survival in MND.
EPHA4 also plays a role in the cytoskeleton which means that researchers can explore this pathway in more detail as it, in conjunction with the Profilin 1 finding, suggests that this guidance/growth system of motor neurones may play an important role in the development of MND.
Advancing our understanding of C9ORF72
Since the discovery that a repeat expansion in the C9ORF72 can cause MND in 2011, researchers have been working to understand more about it. We announced that we would be funding a new Fellowship which aims to explore how C9ORF72 causes MND using our DNA bank samples. Very late in 2012, we also heard that MND Association funded researchers had identified the structure of C9ORF72 repeat, which looks (with some artistic license granted) surprisingly like a Battenberg cake! It will be interesting to see this field of research continue to yield exciting developments over 2013 and beyond.
TDP-43 research in yeast
TDP-43 was identified as a cause of inherited MND for approximately 4-5% of people with a positive family history of the disease in 2008. Since then, researchers have been working to identify how this gene can cause MND and how this system could be targetted to develop a new treatment for MND. In November, we wrote about a study which marked the first steps in the identification of a treatment that can target TDP-43, which is found to clump together in over 90% of cases of MND. Using a novel yeast model, the research group identified that they could reduce the toxic effect of TDP-43 as a potential therapy for MND.
As this is the beginning of the story of TDP-43 specific treatments for MND, it will inevitably be a long journey to answer these questions and to bring treatments to the doctor’s prescription pad. However, it is positive that this research is moving forward and that we are moving in the right direction.
Symposium 2012
One of the highlights from our year is always our International Symposium on ALS/MND. It’s an accumulation of over a year’s worth of work for our Research Development Team and is a fantastic platform that really demonstrates how far research has come in a year.
For our 2012 International Symposium on ALS/MND, we received 419 high quality overviews of research (called abstracts) from across the globe, totaling 172,581 words!
Over 900 researchers, clinicians and healthcare professionals from 30 countries attended our sympsoium in Chicago USA in 2012 to hear 86 platform presentations and to see over 300 poster presentations.
To keep you up to date with news from the symposium, delegates used the Twitter hashtag #alssymp. In total, 950 tweets were sent using this hashtag!
We also blogged live from the symposium to bring you news as it broke, we summarised these findings in our Symposium highlights 2012. There’s still time to share your thoughts about our symposium blogging to assist us with plans for 2013! To take part, please visit www.surveymonkey.com/s/alssymp. We will be closing this survey on 31 January.
Thank you!
For following news from the ever changing world of MND research on the MND Association’ research blog, we would like to thank you! We hope you enjoy reading our blog posts in 2013 and help us to raise awareness of MND and the pace of research by sharing our news stories with your friends and family!
