Reading Time: 3 minutes Every year in December the MND Association organizes the largest medical and scientific conference specific to MND in the world. The International Symposium on ALS/MND attracts over 800 researchers, clinicians and healthcare professionals, representing the energy and dynamism of the global MND research community. The symposium in Chicago last year had a record attendance of over 900 delegates with…
Reading Time: 3 minutes On the last day of the 23rd International Symposium on ALS/MND in Chicago last week there was an excellent session on ‘the role of non-neuronal cells’ – it was an exciting session – below is a flavour of some of the topics discussed. As its name suggests, motor neurone disease causes the degeneration of motor…
Reading Time: 3 minutes Growing up in a seaside town in the 1980s led to me spending a lot of my “formative years” in the local amusement arcades, playing iconic video games like Space Invaders (at which I was average) and Asteroids (I was the kid to beat!). One game I never got the hang of was Pac Man,…
Reading Time: 2 minutes Many congratulations to Rosa Rademakers from Mayo Clinic Florida USA, winner of this year’s Paulo Gontijo Young Investigator award. She won the award for her work on co-discovering the gene defect in C9orf72. As part of her prize (in addition to a medal and a cheque to continue her work) she gave an overview of…
Reading Time: < 1 minute November has been an incredibly busy time for us, not because of Christmas, but because the 23rd International Symposium on ALS/MND is now only one week away! We’ve been incredibly busy building up for this year’s symposium including; preparing the final abstract book, promoting the #alssymp hashtag on Twitter and gathering enough information to support Belinda before she…
Reading Time: 2 minutes Every year we are responsible, as an Association, for organising the BIGGEST international conference event of the year on MND. The 23rd International Symposium on ALS/MND will return, after 16 years, to the windy city of Chicago from the 5-7 December this year. This event is one of the most exciting events in the research…
Reading Time: 2 minutes The Opening Session theme on how the disease progresses within the Central Nervous System (CNS) continued with the presentation by Prof Stan Appel from Baylor College of Medicine, Huston on neuroinflammation. Examination of post-mortem brain and spinal cords from people with MND shows clear evidence of inflammation (although Prof Appel was quick to point out…
Reading Time: 3 minutes Proteins are the building blocks of our cells and have a variety of important roles within our bodies. The instructions for how to build our proteins sit within our DNA, our genetic code in the control centre of our cells (the nucleus). There are many steps to go through from reading that ‘raw’ instruction to…
Reading Time: < 1 minute MND researchers from around the world who are hoping to present their work at this year’s International Symposium on ALS/MND are (we hope!) preparing to submit to us brief summaries of their proposed presentations. These summaries, known as abstracts, have been trickling in since March. Based on the form of earlier years, the trickle will…
