Ice Bucket Challenge helped make ALS breakthrough possible, researchers say

One year ago, the Ice Bucket Challenge was in full swing.

“Even though the Ice Bucket Challenge raised a lot of money previous year, there is still so much to do”, Team Gleason executive director Paul Varisco said in a statement. The Ice Bucket Challenge helped raise more than 0 million to fight ALS. However, the cause still has yet to capture anywhere near the same level of momentum that it did past year, when people around the world took turns dousing themselves with ice-cold water in the name of raising money and awareness, including a countless list of celebrities, politicians and sports stars.

The money, the national organization promised, went towards research on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. As many as 30,000 Americans suffer from ALS.

“It really spearheaded some of the research that otherwise we would not be able to do as rapidly as we could have”, Wong said. You can take part in the Ice Bucket Challenge Friday, August 28 at Midtown Park in North Hills from 7 p.m.to 9 p.m. The challenge does not end there.

The breakthrough study identified the function of a protein related to ALS called TDP-43.

“The more programs we get funded for research the better chance we have of seeing a cure”, Spence said.

Most exciting however, is that when scientists devised and genetically input a special protein to imitate the managerial role of TDP-43 in mouse stem cells, the frail cells came back to life and worked as usual. But a loss of TDP-43 increased the amount of cryptic exons, which caused a cascade of events that led to cell death.

Tony Heyl, spokesman for the ALS Association chapter for the greater Philadelphia region, which includes Lancaster County, said that while nothing is enough until it accomplishes a cure, research in the past five years and the recent finding in particular are promising. “Replacing those lost functions may be a therapeutic strategy”.

Two researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore created their own Ice Bucket Challenge video to announce a breakthrough discovery.

Never had I seen a fundraiser trend on social media like the Ice Bucket Challenge did.