Mary Chapman, features writer —

Kevin Schaefer hadn’t been in an airport since he was 4 years old, so he had been looking forward to flying from his home in Cary, North Carolina, to Anaheim, California, in June for the 2019 Cure SMA Conference. As it turned out, his experience didn’t go as expected.

A $1 million gift from the Manouk Djoukhadjian Family Foundation II will create Quebec’s first philanthropic research chair on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The donation to the Armand-Frappier Foundation will establish the Anna Sforza Djoukhadjian Philanthropic Research Chair to advance ALS research at the Institut national…

To help accelerate development of effective treatments for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), the ALS Association is investing $3 million in the disease’s first platform trial. The award is $1 million annually for three years to support the platform investigation, a type of clinical study that evaluates the…

The founder of the END ALS Association, Masahiro “Hiro” Fujita, can no longer move and can barely communicate because of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). To help him enjoy the holidays and to raise disease awareness, his organization launched the Merry & Bright — EEG Illumination project. The effort…

For its promising investigational therapeutic approach to neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), BrainStorm Cell Therapeutics is the Buzz of BIO 2020 winner in the Public Therapeutic Biotech category. The Buzz of BIO contest identifies U.S. companies with groundbreaking, early-stage potential…

Touted as the largest amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) investigative effort to date, the Answer ALS research program has finished an initial technology infrastructure stage and is ready to embark on its goal of finding more effective ALS treatments and, ideally, a cure. A consortium of nearly two dozen medical…

A new ALS Association partnership with the ALS Investment Fund II seeks to raise $100 million in new funding to advance amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) therapy development. This second venture fund follows one that originated in the Netherlands and raised $25 million in 2.5 years to support…

With a $100,000 grant, the FTD Disorders Registry has received a boost from CurePSP, a nonprofit organization working to enhance awareness, education and care for prime-of-life neurodegenerative diseases. Launched in 2017 by the Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration (AFTD) and the Bluefield Project to Cure FTD — with…

When intrastate rivals University of Washington (UW) and Washington State University (WSU) met Nov. 29 for the storied Boeing Apple Cup Series, the battle wasn’t just about football — it was also about amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The teams’ fan bases were vying to see which…

A $106 million Weill Family Foundation initiative will bring together interdisciplinary researchers and clinicians at three West Coast universities in hopes of finding new treatments for brain and nervous system disorders such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley), the University…