Reading Time: 3 minutes Association-funded PhD student, Helena Chaytow (Royal Holloway, University of London), is using DNA to develop a targeted treatment for MND. Now entering her final year, we report on what she’s achieved so far and her future plans. The background Helena’s research is looking at the chemical messenger ‘glutamate’. Glutamate is released by motor neurones in…
Reading Time: 4 minutes With all the talk of new gene discoveries in recent years, the Sunday morning scientific session returned to the original discovery in 1993 that mutations in the SOD1 gene were responsible for around a fifth of familial (inherited) MND cases and 2-3% of all cases of the disease. Although much of our understanding of MND…
Reading Time: 2 minutes Following on from baking, and understanding the roles of genes and proteins, Helena Chaytow (Royal Holloway) explains about her research. Helena is an MND Association-funded PhD student developing small strands of DNA, known as ‘antisense oligonucleotides’ to make motor neurones more resistant to damage. DNA and RNA The challenge of working with Motor Neuron Disease (MND)…
