On Nov. 19, ALS Societies across Canada and the ALS Canada Research Program in partnership with Brain Canada announced results from this year’s ALS Ice Bucket Challenge as well as the new list of grant recipients from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) research competitions held in 2015. ALS is a disease that involves a gradual…

Amylyx Pharmaceuticals was recently awarded $600,000 from the ALS Finding a Cure Foundation and the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund, in addition to an estimated $1.3 million raised through private investors, to develop its lead drug candidate AMX0035 for the treatment of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in a clinical trial planned for…

MediciNova, Inc. recently announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the protocol of a novel clinical trial in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) to assess MN-166 (ibudilast) on a biomarker of ALS. The Phase 2a trial, titled “A Single-Center, Open-Label Biomarker Study to…

Avalon Ventures, a venture capital firm that has founded and/or funded more than 127 information technology and life sciences companies, and multinational pharma firm GSK have announced an expansion of their collaboration to fund and launch early-stage life science companies in the San Diego, California, area. The Avalon/GSK…

Some forms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) could actually be caused by an infectious virus, with scientists reporting that human endogenous retrovirus-K (HERV-K), normally dormant, has been found in an active form in the postmortem brain cells of certain individuals with ALS. Experiments using the active HERV-K in cells grown in…

A recent study from researchers in Canada and Japan describes a new possible target for the treatment of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The paper, titled “Ubiquilin-2 drives NF-κB activity and cytosolic TDP-43 aggregation in neuronal cells,” appeared on Oct. 31 in the journal Molecular Brain.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh studied the effect of the hormone serotonin in the regeneration of motor neurons after spinal cord injury that may one day hold implications in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), part of a large group of motor neuron diseases. The research paper, entitled “Serotonin Promotes Development…

Because amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is such a devastating disease, there is a need for novel and efficacious therapies and several studies hypothesize that growth hormone may be one of them. In a new review paper titled “The neuroprotective effects of human growth hormone as a potential treatment for amyotrophic lateral…

A consortium dedicated to finding a cure for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), comprised of ALS ACT, The ALS Association, ALS Finding a Cure, and the Translational Research Advancing Therapy ALS (TREAT ALS™) Northeast ALS Consortium (NEALS), has just announced the official start of acceptance of proposals for Phase II clinical trials for potentially groundbreaking treatments for the disease.

An ALS Association-sponsored meeting, held at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Huntington, New York, brought together expert researchers to discuss three main themes in current amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) research: antisense therapy, gene therapy and stem cell therapy. Recent ALS therapeutic approaches have not been very successful, with only one drug,…