Close
New gene therapy targeting C9orf72-ALS begins Phase 1 clinical trial in the UK

New gene therapy targeting C9orf72-ALS begins Phase 1 clinical trial in the UK

Reading Time: 2 minutes This article was written by Dr Keith Mayl and Dr Ahmad Al Khleifat of King’s College London. Researchers at King’s College Hospital, led by Professor Christopher Shaw, have embarked on the first gene therapy clinical trial for patients affected by a specific genetic form of ALS, the most common type of MND. ALS is a…

Steps to understanding MND
According to the multistep hypothesis, the six steps necessary to develop MND reduce to four in people with TARDBP gene mutation, three steps in C9ORF72, and two steps in SOD1.

Steps to understanding MND

Reading Time: 3 minutes Love them or loath them, the band Steps’ first single ‘5,6,7,8’ was a techno line dance song released in 1998 from their debut album ‘step one’, with the B side ‘words of wisdom’. Using this forced and purely tenuous link and an equally awkward segue, I would like to share with you the news that…

Professor Ammar Al-Chalabi wins prestigious prize

Reading Time: 2 minutes Huge congratulations to Professor Ammar Al-Chalabi for winning the prestigious Sheila Essey Award at the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) research conference taking place in Vancouver, Canada. Professor Al-Chalabi is an MND Association funded researcher and Professor of Neurology and Complex Disease Genetics at King’s College London. He is also the Director of our MND Care and Research…

Improving the classification of ALS – can we make it logical?

Reading Time: 3 minutes Yesterday at the International Symposium on ALS/MND Prof Ammar Al-Chalabi (Director of King’s Care Centre and Professor of Complex Genetics at King’s College London) cautioned the motor neurone disease (MND) research community about the confusing way we describe this disease we are all fighting. He started his talk by showing a standard definition of what MND…

On the fifth day of Christmas MND research gave to me: 5+1 steps trigger MND

Reading Time: < 1 minute  “On the fifth day of Christmas MND research gives to you… FIVE +1 triggers believed to cause MND” Under the leadership of Prof Neil Pearce at Prof Ammar Al-Chalabi, researchers have used a mathematical approach previously used by cancer researchers to explain why MND is an adult-onset disease, and why it varies (even within families). The…

Lessons learnt from cancer – identifying the causes of MND

Reading Time: 4 minutes Published in Lancet Neurology on 7 October 2014, Association-funded researcher, Prof Ammar Al-Chalabi based at King’s College London, and an international team of researchers have used a new approach to study the causes of MND. Under the leadership of Prof Neil Pearce, based at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, researchers have used a mathematical…