“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.
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Scientists at John Hopkins University announced a new breakthrough in ALS research, partly crediting the interest and funds raised by the Ice Bucket Challenge.
Jeannette Beck of Ephrata, whose husband Jim died in 2008 after a three-year battle with ALS, said she hadn’t heard about the finding but thinks anything that can help fight the disease is tremendous.
“This intriguing result provides a new understanding of the normal role of TDP-43”, said ALS Association Chief Scientist Lucie Bruijn.
Patients like the Lehigh Valley’s Donna Spence Katcher who was diagnosed 10 years ago. “We have to do everything we can to raise money and awareness until we have that cure”.
“We hope this will be the first of many research discoveries fueled by people’s participation in the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge”, said Barb Newhouse, President and CEO of The ALS Association.
“For the people who are now suffering, it’s a little bit more hope”, says Croom.
It’s not just Donna, stars like Renee Zellweger and Major League Baseball are once again putting people to the challenge and raising the bar for awareness.
The ALS Association said this month that it’s going to reprise the chilly challenge “this August and every August until there’s a cure” for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which is also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Money raised is already making a real difference. Jonathan Ling and Philip Wong say they have discovered how a brain protein called TDP-43 linked to A-L-S works.
“Patient programs seeing improvements”. “Today, in our Science paper, we actually show evidence of cryptic exons in the brain autopsies of ALS cases, suggesting that some of our theories were right all along: TDP-43 isn’t doing its job correctly in ALS”. They tossed buckets filled with ice and water over each other’s heads, laughing and screaming as the freezing water poured down their bodies.
The Ice Bucket Challenge isn’t expected to run dry anytime soon.
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“We’ve known about TDP-43 for almost a decade but never really understood what it did”, Ling wrote.
