“Every August Until A Cure” campaign
[projekktor id=’20419′]
Scientists in Maryland have made a new discovery that could lead to a cure for ALS.
It’s been about a year since the ice bucket challenge reached peak popularity, and these researchers say without it, they wouldn’t have made this progress.
The lead author of the study hosted a question and answer session on the website, Reddit, earlier this week. He says this breakthrough brings us one step closer to a cure and it wouldn’t have happened without the ice bucket challenge.
In 2014, the ALS ice bucket challenge raised well over $120 million in North America.
And researchers at Johns Hopkins University say they’re on their way to a cure because of it.
“Without it we wouldn’t be able to do this.” says lead researcher at Johns Hopkins, Jonathan Ling.
They’ve discovered that in ALS patients, a protein called TDP-43 is defective and confuses cells, causing them to generate nonsense proteins.
“When you remove it completely, these cells die within two to three days. However when you put back a special protein that we designed to replicate TDP-43’s function, what we believe to be its function, we actually found that these cells are completely healthy. They don’t die at all.”
When they replaced the defective TDP-43 from mouse stem cells with an engineered replica, the cells returned to normal.
With funding from the ice bucket challenge, they are trying to develop a therapy that will work on humans.
Research on this side of the border is on a similarly steep upward trajectory, according to Dr. Dave Taylor with ALS Canada.
“We are learning more in the past few years than we have in the previous century for ALS.”
He says funding from the challenge will likely lead to tangible progress in just two to three years.
“That’s why we want to see it every august until a cure. Because if the public can continue to support us we’re going to accelerate the pace at which we can have treatments to make this a treatable, not terminal disease in the foreseeable future.”
The ‘every August until a cure’ campaign is encouraging people to follow in the Toronto Blue Jays’ footsteps, and take the challenge until ALS is history.
