Reading Time: < 1 minute Sixty of the world’s leading stem cell research experts are meeting in New York, USA on 24 to 25 January to discuss and debate MND stem cell research. Stem cells are the newest and ‘hottest’ research tool around. Some types of stem cell are able to turn into any other cell in the body given…
Reading Time: < 1 minute We are now funding a studentship stem cell research project! This project aims to develop a human motor neurone model of MND using skin cells donated by a few people living with the randomly occurring sporadic form of the disease. Using this model they will then identify what goes wrong in cells when TDP-43 (a known cause…
Reading Time: 2 minutes Alternative treatments can be tempting if you have a disease like MND, for which conventional medicine can only offer one moderately effective drug. Unfortunately this temptation is easily preyed upon by clinics around the world that claim to be able to provide effective treatments or even a cure (at great expense of course), despite having no supporting evidence. We often take enquiries…
Reading Time: < 1 minute When I started my job at the Association just four years ago we were funding 19 research projects and studentships. Researchers were using animal models based on the one major disease-causing gene that had been discovered to try and learn more about the mechanisms underlying all types of MND, which I thought was all pretty clever…
Reading Time: 3 minutes It’s Friday afternoon and I’m just back from a press briefing in London, where we were unveiling an exciting new stem cell research programme. I’ve just realised that we’ve put a press embargo on until Monday, so this won’t be posted until Monday morning – otherwise I’ll be breaking our own embargo….. The press briefing…
Reading Time: 2 minutes With the internet providing an expanse of ‘quackery’ jumbled up with facts, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for anybody to know what source of information can be trusted. This issue is especially apparent to us when we add unproven treatments into the mix. An unproven treatment is, quite literally, a treatment that has no reliable proof for…
