Reading Time: 5 minutes This is blog number two in our ‘Symposium Blogathon’ – counting down to the 32nd International Symposium on ALS/MND. Numbers in bold green text correspond to the code in the abstract book. Click on the number to be redirected to the full abstract (the page may take a minute to load). Approximately 10% of people…
Reading Time: 4 minutes Guest researcher blog post written by Jade Howard. Hello, my name is Jade Howard and I am a second year PhD student from The Health Services Research Unit at the University of Aberdeen. I am working on a study of families’ experiences of inherited forms of MND, which affect around 5-10% of people with the…
Reading Time: 5 minutes Last Thursday marked an exciting milestone in the search for effective therapies for MND as full results from the early-phase 1/2 trial of Biogen’s tofersen antisense oligonucleotide therapy for SOD1-ALS were published in The New England Journal of Medicine. In the same issue, a study investigating the use of microRNA in a viral vector to…
Reading Time: 4 minutes After its successful premiere in 2017, the University of Oxford organised another meeting of people affected by inherited MND, called ‘Families for the Treatment of Hereditary MND (FaTHoM)’. This turned out to be yet another excellent day where MND clinicians-researchers presented on topics such as genetics of MND, genetic testing and gene therapies. Below you…
Reading Time: 4 minutes In April this year MND clinician-researchers Professors Martin Turner and Kevin Talbot at the University of Oxford organised an information day about the rare, inherited form of MND called ‘Families for the Treatment of Hereditary MND’ (FATHoM). The day was filmed and podcasts of the talks have recently become available. This article gives an overview…
Reading Time: 2 minutes Scientists from the University of Oxford have set up ‘Families for the Treatment of Hereditary MND’ (FaTHoM), an initiative to bring together the community of families affected by inherited forms of MND. Their first meeting will take place in Oxford on Tuesday 18th April. Most people living with MND cannot identify a relative who has…
Reading Time: 4 minutes A huge ‘atlas’ mapping the locations of motor neurone disease (MND) causing mutations within the genetic code has been collated. This has followed years of genetic analysis and sequencing of the DNA of people with MND, and their family members. The people who have given their time and DNA have played a hugely important part…
Reading Time: 4 minutes MND Association and Alzheimer’s Research UK-funded researchers from University College London have identified that toxic proteins may cause motor neurones to die in C9orf72 MND and frontotemporal dementia. Published open access in the journal Science on Thursday 7 August, this research explains more about one of the most common forms of inherited MND.
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…
