Reading Time: 2 minutes What is the MND Register? The MND Register is a major five year project that aims to collect and store information about every person living with MND in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It is led by world-class MND researchers Prof Ammar Al-Chalabi and Prof Kevin Talbot, at a cost of £400,500 (our grant reference:…
Reading Time: 2 minutes Prior research has already shown that build-up of the protein TDP-43 is found in the majority of cases of MND (irrespective of whether it was caused by an inherited genetic mistake). In healthy nerve cells, TDP-43 is normally found in the cell nucleus (the management centre of the cell). But when we look at nerve…
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…
Reading Time: 3 minutes Project MinE is an international genetics project that is analysing DNA from people with MND in detail. For the majority of people with MND, the disease appears ‘sporadically’ for no apparent reason. For a small number of people, approximately 5-10% of those with MND there is an inherited link, in other words the disease runs in…
Reading Time: 2 minutes It wouldn’t be the Symposium without a new gene discovery. Although technology has allowed incredible advances in the gene-hunting field, this is countered by the fact that as more and more familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (FALS) genes are found, it makes the search for the remaining unknown genes harder This is in part due to…
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…
Reading Time: 4 minutes Dr Frank Hirth is one of the world’s leading fruit fly MND researchers. Based at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London, he has been working on an Association-funded project developing a C9orf72 fruit fly model of MND. Here we mark the end of this project, and report on what the…
Reading Time: < 1 minute The final day of our ‘twelve days of Christmas’ blogs has arrived. We hope you’ve enjoyed our festive overview of 2014 and we look forward to sharing many more research updates throughout 2015! “On the twelfth day of Christmas MND research gives to you… TWELVE – a relatively small number of authors for an MND…
Reading Time: 3 minutes During December and November the Research Development team receive a number of Christmas presents from our funded researchers. These presents come in the form of ‘annual reports’ and, although they may not be wrapped in Christmas paper, once you open them you’re sure to find a nice research surprise! One of our PhD students, Ambra…
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…
