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: 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…
Reading Time: 4 minutes This article was written by our Senior Clinical Fellow Prof Martin Turner, a Consultant Neurologist at John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford. “Will it affect my children?” This is one of the questions most commonly asked by people diagnosed with MND. The 20th century answer was a simple “no”, or at least “very unlikely”. With recent scientific…
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: 3 minutes A new research paper has been published today in the Science Translational Medicine journal, describing a new gene implicated in developing MND. What is this gene and why is it important for our fight against MND? Although they are not the sole cause of MND, genes play a big role in someone’s probability of developing the…
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: 2 minutes In previous research Prof Kevin Talbot and colleagues at the University of Oxford began to understand more about how the C9orf72 gene defect causes human motor neurones to die. These studies were carried out using an impressive piece of lab technology, called induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology. iPSC technology allows skin cells to be…
