Reading Time: 2 minutes Today marks the beginning of the next year in MND research around the world, or at least it certainly feels like that! It is the first day of the three day, international MND research conference that the MND Association of England, Wales and Northern Ireland is immensely proud to organise.
Reading Time: 2 minutes Two sets of MND genetic results were published yesterday. One of these results was about the importance of a new gene called NEK1. The second highlighted the role of gene C21orf2 in MND – we wrote an article about this yesterday. Both sets of results were published in the prestigious journal Nature Genetics. What are…
Reading Time: 3 minutes Today some exciting news about the genetics of MND was published in the scientific journal Nature Genetics. The results come in two research papers published in the same issue of the journal. This blog post discusses the results of the first of these papers for which King’s College London based Professor Ammar Al-Chalabi was one…
Reading Time: 2 minutes Dr Pietro Fratta completed his first MRC-MND Association Clinical Research Training Fellowship in 2014. Last year he was awarded a new £1.16 million Clinician Scientist Fellowship to continue his research at University College London, studying the earliest physical changes that affect motor neurons in MND (our reference 946-795). Our contribution to this four year research…
Reading Time: 3 minutes When diagnosing MND, it is important to look at the activity and impact of the motor neurones themselves – is the electrical message being carried down the nerve properly, and is it reaching the end of the nerve in the muscle? Malfunctions in the electrical activity at the muscle end of the nerve cell result…
Reading Time: 3 minutes Developing a way to rapidly diagnose and track how MND progresses over time is a ‘holy grail’ of MND research. The search for so called ‘biomarkers’ is an area that researchers funded by the MND Association are actively pursuing. MND Association grantees Dr Andrea Malaspina and Dr Ian Pike (Blizard Institute, Queen Mary University of…
Reading Time: 2 minutes Induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology has enabled researchers to create and study living human motor neurones in the lab, derived originally from patient skin cells. This project (our reference 80-970-797) is a collaboration between the labs of Professors Chris Shaw and Jack Price at King’s College in London and Siddharthan Chandran in Edinburgh. It…
Reading Time: 2 minutes Background to C9orf72 toxicity We know that damage to C9orf72 (both the gene and the protein it makes) is a crucial step in why some people get MND and why some people get frontotemporal dementia. There are three possible reasons why C9orf72 is toxic. 1) the way the gene is damaged alters how it normally…
Reading Time: 2 minutes If you looked at the motor neurones of people with MND down the microscope you would see clumps of a protein called TDP-43. Researchers around the world are working to find why these clumps form and how they are linked to MND. Dr Jemeen Sreedharan has been looking at the effects of TDP-43 in fruit…
Reading Time: 2 minutes Developing disease models is important for furthering our understanding of MND and allows researchers to screen potential new drugs for a beneficial effect. Moving a promising ‘nearly drug’ from the lab to being tested in people is known as ‘translational research’. Dr Richard Mead was awarded the Kenneth Snowman/MND Association Lectureship in Translational Neuroscience in…
