“Without it, we wouldn’t have been able to come out with the studies as quickly as we did”, said Philip Wong, a professor at Johns Hopkins who led the research team, told The Washington Post.
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“Even though the Ice Bucket Challenge raised a lot of money past year , there is still so much to do”, Team Gleason executive director Paul Varisco said in a statement.
It has been a year since your social media accounts were flooded with videos of people accepting the ALS challenges and pouring cold water on their heads. According to the ALS Association, once diagnosed, a person is usually given between 2 to 5 years to live.
“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. “As of past year if we didn’t have the ice bucket challenge those programs wouldn’t be funded”, Spence pointed out.
“There’s this protein called TDP-43 that doesn’t seem to be doing its job in the neurons of ALS patients”, said Johns Hopkins graduate student Jonathan Ling. About a decade ago, researchers discovered people with A-L-S often had clumps of TDP-43 protein outside the nucleus of their brain cells. This is how they can help us: “they can do the Ice Bucket Challenge, they can do the walk in September, they can just donate money”. Researchers also found an abnormal increase in cryptic exon in the brains of people with ALS. “And in this case, they can compete for a cause that still needs a great deal of attention”. All of your donations have been amazingly helpful and we have been working tirelessly to find a cure.
“With the amount of money that the Ice Bucket Challenge raised, I feel that there’s a lot of hope and optimism now for real, meaningful therapies”.
The Ice Bucket Challenge isn’t expected to run dry anytime soon. Gleason has become a leader in the fight to search for a cure and improve the lives of patients stricken with such diseases.
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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.
