Reading Time: 3 minutes Researchers from University College London led by Dr Pietro Fratta and Dr John Thornton found that muscle imaging can help distinguish Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) from Kennedy’s Disease based on the way specific muscle groups deteriorate in each condition. The method can also help assess the severity of the disease. ALS is a rapidly progressing…
Reading Time: 4 minutes Recently published results from the open-label Lighthouse trial investigating safety of the drug Triumeq in people with MND revealed the treatment was safe and ready to progress to a larger Phase 3 clinical trial. The trial was held in Australia and recruited 40 people with MND who all received the active drug; this was because…
Reading Time: 5 minutes Despite the winter chill, there is a warm fuzzy feeling today with the news of a paper published in the journal ‘Brain’ by an MND Association funded Research Fellow, Dr Scott Allen. Based at the Sheffield Institute for Translational Neuroscience (SITraN), Dr Allen was awarded a Senior Non-Clinical Research Fellowship by the Association in 2016,…
Reading Time: 7 minutes In November 2018 the Home Office released a draft Guideline scope for Cannabis-based products for medicinal use in which they announced that specialist doctors (like consultant neurologists) on the Special Register of the General Medical Council will be able to prescribe cannabis-based medicinal products to some patients. Before this, the only cannabis-based medicines licensed for…
Reading Time: 5 minutes There has recently been a flood of news stories on the outcomes of the Australian Phase 1 clinical trial investigating Copper ATSM (CuATSM) which is a small man-made compound that can selectively deliver copper to cells. The results were first presented at our International Symposium in Glasgow back in December. MND is a terrible disease…
Reading Time: 2 minutes On Friday 5 May in America, the FDA, the organisation that approves drugs, announced that they’d granted a licence for the drug known as a Edaravone (to be marketed as Radicava ) for the treatment of MND. It’s unexpected news and we’re currently working out what this means for people with MND in the UK.…
Reading Time: 3 minutes Yesterday the Reta Lila Weston Trust announced that they will be funding Dr Nikhil Sharma and colleagues at the Leonard Wolfson Experimental Neurology Centre (LWENC) to investigate whether the bacteria that live in our guts could alter the progression of MND. The grant is for £1.2 million over a period of four years. The LWENC…
Reading Time: 3 minutes Over 100 talks were given at this month’s International Symposium on ALS/MND in Dublin. There were also over 450 posters of research being presented too. Time in the conference programme was allocated on Wednesday and Thursday evening (day 1 and day 2 of the 3 day conference) to visit the posters – you might think…
Reading Time: 4 minutes As well as all the networking, debate and new information being shared, the International Symposium on ALS/MND is also a time to celebrate achievements by the giving of awards. The Biomedical and Clinical poster prizes are an opportunity to recognise and celebrate the excellent research and clinical practice being conducted by those early in their…
Reading Time: 2 minutes I firmly believe that the quality of research is only as good as the researcher doing it, which is why the MND Association places a lot of emphasis on providing opportunities to attract, train and retain the brightest and best investigators in the UK and Ireland to develop their careers in MND research. These range…
