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Stem cells and MND

Reading Time: 4 minutes Each year, the MND Association dedicates the month of June to raising MND awareness. This year, we focus on the eyes – in most people with MND the only part of their body they can still move and the only way left for them to communicate. Alongside the Association-wide campaign, the Research Development team selected…

Using DNA Bank samples to create iPSC models of MND

Reading Time: 2 minutes Induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology has enabled researchers to create and study living human motor neurones in the lab, derived originally from patient skin cells. This project (our reference 80-970-797) is a collaboration between the labs of Professors Chris Shaw and Jack Price at King’s College in London and Siddharthan Chandran in Edinburgh. It…

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness…..and prizes….

Reading Time: 3 minutes The fantastic news that Patrick Joyce and his co-inventors have won the 2015 Hackaday Prize for their ‘Eyedrivomatic’ invention is one of a number of research prizes announced this autumn. At the beginning of November Prof Martin Turner was presented with the Graham Bull Prize for Clinical Science by the Royal College of Physicians (RCP). The…

Measuring the nerve impulse

Reading Time: 4 minutes Researchers identify that loss of nerve signalling may be an early sign of MND Published in Nature Communications on 12 January 2015, Association-funded PhD student Anna-Claire Devlin, based at the University of St Andrews, has identified that loss of nerve signalling may be an early sign of MND. Under the leadership of Dr Gareth Miles and…

Using induced pluripotent stem cells to further our understanding of MND

Reading Time: 4 minutes Dr Jakub Scaber from the University of Oxford is our newest Medical Research Council (MRC)/ MND Association Lady Edith Wolfson Clinical Research Fellow. He is investigating how the newly identified C9orf72 gene causes MND in some individuals using induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell technology. Researchers funded by the Association were amongst the first to create human…