Cause of ALS is found, Northwestern team says (2011)

chicagotribune.com

32 points·davidst··8 comments

This is an old article from 2011. Nevertheless, it was a breakthrough paper done by a team that has worked with ALS research for a long time.

So not much has happened in the meantime? No clinical trial progress?

I'd assume that gap between one research paper identifying biomedical mechanism and making a first few drugs for clinical trials is at least 5-10 years, probably more because I'd imagine it isn't trivial to find a drug that can regulate the protein pathways in a robust way.

Those in the biomedical industry could enlighten us about typical time spans.

Ditto. OLD ARTICLE FROM 2011.

My first job out of university was as a developer at www.als.net. In the 1.5y that I was there I saw two of these "breakthrough" studies that got patients' hopes up but amounted to nothing.

I'll withhold my enthusiasm, though I sincerely hope this is one that leads to a cure. It's horrible, and research is underfunded due to its status as an orphan disease[1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_disease

(2011)

Still great and all, but I was really hoping to show this to the people that keep complaining about how the ice bucket challenge is just another vapid, attention-seeking fad that's roughly equivalent to armchair activism.

Edit: Also I realize that even if this were a current article the odds of it being a result of the donations brought in by ice bucket challenge and not an existing years-long effort are basically nil, but still. Had my hopes up there for a minute.

This has some more information:

http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/amyotrophiclateralscleros...

It references data in the OP.

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