Reading Time: 5 minutes Research into MND has increased over recent years and we now have a greater understanding of what is happening within the body during the disease. Only by understanding what is happening within the cells during the disease, will researchers discover the right targets to hit in the development of potential treatments. There is still a…
Reading Time: 4 minutes Guest researcher blog post written by Jade Howard. Hello, my name is Jade Howard and I am a second year PhD student from The Health Services Research Unit at the University of Aberdeen. I am working on a study of families’ experiences of inherited forms of MND, which affect around 5-10% of people with the…
Reading Time: 5 minutes Guest researcher blog post written by Matthew Nolan. My name is Matthew, I’m currently a post-doctoral researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in the USA, supported by a Cullen Education and Research Young Investigator Award. Last year I finished my MND Association-funded PhD at the University of Oxford, where I was supervised by…
Reading Time: 4 minutes This article was written by our Senior Clinical Fellow Prof Martin Turner, a Consultant Neurologist at John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford. “Will it affect my children?” This is one of the questions most commonly asked by people diagnosed with MND. The 20th century answer was a simple “no”, or at least “very unlikely”. With recent scientific…
Reading Time: 4 minutes In April this year MND clinician-researchers Professors Martin Turner and Kevin Talbot at the University of Oxford organised an information day about the rare, inherited form of MND called ‘Families for the Treatment of Hereditary MND’ (FATHoM). The day was filmed and podcasts of the talks have recently become available. This article gives an overview…
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…
Reading Time: 2 minutes Scientists from the University of Oxford have set up ‘Families for the Treatment of Hereditary MND’ (FaTHoM), an initiative to bring together the community of families affected by inherited forms of MND. Their first meeting will take place in Oxford on Tuesday 18th April. Most people living with MND cannot identify a relative who has…
Reading Time: 3 minutes The MND Association are funding Prof Kevin Talbot, Dr Ruxandra Dafinca (née Mutihac) and colleagues at the University of Oxford, who are investigating the link between the C9orf72 and TDP-43 genes in MND. We wrote about this research earlier in the year. As we’ve recently received their first year progress report we wanted to give…
Reading Time: 3 minutes The AMBRoSIA (A Multicentre Biomarker Resource Strategy In ALS) project is our biggest, most ambitious research undertaking to date. The project funding began in August, closely followed by being the focus of this month’s ‘Make Your Mark’ fundraising appeal. Here we explain more about what this flagship project is all about.
Reading Time: 2 minutes In previous research Prof Kevin Talbot and colleagues at the University of Oxford began to understand more about how the C9orf72 gene defect causes human motor neurones to die. These studies were carried out using an impressive piece of lab technology, called induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology. iPSC technology allows skin cells to be…
