ALS Patients Advocate for “Right to Try” Experimental Drug

Patients who suffer from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) are joining efforts in new ways to support the approval of legislation known as the “Right to Try” law. After a series of online forums and petitions, an ALS patient was granted an audience at Capitol Hill to read a letter about…

This week, Kadimastem, an innovative Israeli biotechnology company focused on the industrial development and commercialization of human pluripotent stem cell (hPSC)-based therapeutic solutions for the neurodegenerative diseases Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), announced that it plans to begin human trials using its stem-cell technology to…

Changes in a house-keeping gene that cleans up damaged proteins from cells may be in part to blame for Lou Gehrig’s disease, according to a study published online March 24 in Nature Neuroscience, titled “Haploinsufficiency of TBK1 causes familial ALS and fronto-temporal dementia.” Lou Gehrig’s…

Researchers at the Second University of Naples and the University of Parma in Italy recently characterized the microstructural brain alterations in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) during disease progression. The findings were published in the journal PLoS ONE and the study is entitled…

Pharmaceutical company AB Science SA received orphan drug designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its investigational therapy for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), called masitinib. The drug is a protein kinase inhibitor (PKI) and was granted the status in order to accelerate its…

Massachusetts-based pharmaceutical company Biogen Idec Inc. has decided to rebrand the company with a shorter name and a new logo, as well as by refocusing its work and abandoning its near exclusivity to multiple sclerosis (MS) drugs to also include research on conditions such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).