There is evidence of positive karma in the world. Prior posts here and here cover Doug McConnell swimming the English Channel (thirty miles and just over 14 hours) to raise money for scientific research for ALS research; the long journey honors Doug’s father, who was killed by ALS. Go here for a picture of Doug and his swimming partner, Dan MacDonald. Go here for a picture of Doug during the swim – the picture is part of Doug’s web site for A Long Swim. Don’t miss noting the waves that put the swim in greater perspective – open water swimming is exponentially different than hopping in a pool and turning on an underwater Itunes device. To obtain some perspective on the incredibly grueling nature of A Long Swim, read the story of the swim as told and shown by Doug’s wife, Susan, on her blog – My Bionic Boyfriend. The post is titled The Things We Do for Love. And, contrast Susan’s telling with Doug’s telling, which is in progress. Here, he provides some understated insights into mechanics of the 30 mile journey.
To the karma. To put an exclamation mark on Doug’s message on the importance of scientific research, ScienceDaily on Monday included a summary article with news of a marvelous scientific break-though in finding a root cause of ALS, a/k/a Lou Gehrig’s Disease! The full text of the ScienceDaily article is pasted below. The new study has just been published in Nature, one of the world’s most respected journals for science.
As if that is not great enough, the work reported in Nature was performed at Northwestern University in Chicago at the Feinberg School of Medicine. Not so coincidentally, the researchers publishing the paper are a focal point for the research funded by the Les Turner Foundation that Doug and the team so ably supported and pushed forward with his long swim.
The lead paragraphs of the ScienceDaily summary are pasted below; the entire ScienceDaily summary is online here and also follows the excerpts below. And, the Les Turner foundation has the story on its website, with a video – see the top left corner of the home page. This page from Nature‘s website has the article abstract.
ScienceDaily (Aug. 21, 2011) — The underlying disease process of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS and Lou Gehrig’s disease), a fatal neurodegenerative disease that paralyzes its victims, has long eluded scientists and prevented development of effective therapies. Scientists weren’t even sure all its forms actually converged into a common disease process.
“[A] new Northwestern Medicine study for the first time has identified a common cause of all forms of ALS.
The basis of the disorder is a broken down protein recycling system in the neurons of the spinal cord and the brain. Optimal functioning of the neurons relies on efficient recycling of the protein building blocks in the cells. In ALS, that recycling system is broken. The cell can’t repair or maintain itself and becomes severely damaged.
The discovery by Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine researchers, published in the journal Nature, provides a common target for drug therapy and shows that all types of ALS are, indeed, tributaries, pouring into a common river of cellular incompetence.
“This opens up a whole new field for finding an effective treatment for ALS,” said senior author Teepu Siddique, M.D., the Les Turner ALS Foundation/Herbert C. Wenske Professor of the Davee Department of Neurology and Clinical Neurosciences at Northwestern’s Feinberg School and a neurologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. “We can now test for drugs that would regulate this protein pathway or optimize it, so it functions as it should in a normal state.”
Hopefully the copyright lawyers at ScienceDaily will forgive exuberance on this occasion. See below for the entire text of the ScienceDaily summary.
Common Cause of All Forms of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) Discovered
Artist’s view. The basis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a broken down protein recycling system in the neurons of the spinal cord and the brain. (Credit: © CLIPAREA.com / Fotolia)
The underlying disease process of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS and Lou Gehrig’s disease), a fatal neurodegenerative disease that paralyzes its victims, has long eluded scientists and prevented development of effective therapies. Scientists weren’t even sure all its forms actually converged into a common disease process.
But a new Northwestern Medicine study for the first time has identified a common cause of all forms of ALS.
The basis of the disorder is a broken down protein recycling system in the neurons of the spinal cord and the brain. Optimal functioning of the neurons relies on efficient recycling of the protein building blocks in the cells. In ALS, that recycling system is broken. The cell can’t repair or maintain itself and becomes severely damaged.
The discovery by Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine researchers, published in the journal Nature, provides a common target for drug therapy and shows that all types of ALS are, indeed, tributaries, pouring into a common river of cellular incompetence.
“This opens up a whole new field for finding an effective treatment for ALS,” said senior author Teepu Siddique, M.D., the Les Turner ALS Foundation/Herbert C. Wenske Professor of the Davee Department of Neurology and Clinical Neurosciences at Northwestern’s Feinberg School and a neurologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. “We can now test for drugs that would regulate this protein pathway or optimize it, so it functions as it should in a normal state.”
The discovery of the breakdown in protein recycling may also have a wider role in other neurodegenerative diseases, specifically the dementias. These include Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia as well as Parkinson’s disease, all of which are characterized by aggregations of proteins, Siddique said. The removal of damaged or misfolded proteins is critical for optimal cell functioning, he noted.
This breakdown occurs in all three forms of ALS: hereditary, which is called familial; ALS that is not hereditary, called sporadic; and ALS that targets the brain, ALS/dementia.
In related research, Feinberg School researchers also discovered a new gene mutation present in familial ALS and ALS/dementia, linking these two forms of the disease.
Siddique has been searching for the causes and underlying mechanism of ALS for more than a quarter century. He said he was initially drawn to it because, “It was one of the most difficult problems in neurology and the most devastating, a disease without any treatment or known cause.”
Siddique’s efforts first showed in 1989 that molecular genetics techniques were applicable to ALS, then described the first ALS gene locus in 1991, which led to the discovery of SOD1 and engineering of the first genetic animal model for ALS.
ALS affects an estimated 350,000 people worldwide, including children and adults, with about 50 percent of people dying within three years of its onset. In the motor disease, people progressively lose muscle strength until they become paralyzed and can no longer move, speak, swallow and breathe. ALS/dementia targets the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain, affecting patients’ judgment, the ability to understand language and to perform basic tasks like planning what to wear or organizing their day.
“These people in the prime of their lives and the peak of their productivity get this devastating illness that kills them,” Siddique said. “The people who get ALS/dementia, an even more vicious disease, have a double whammy.”
Broken Down Recycling System
Feinberg School scientists found the cause of ALS by discovering a protein, ubiquilin2, whose critical job is to recycle damaged or misfolded proteins in motor and cortical neurons and shuttle them off to be reprocessed.
In people with ALS, Feinberg researchers found ubiquilin2 isn’t doing its job. As a result, the damaged proteins and ubiquilin2 loiter and accumulate in the motor neurons in the spinal cord and cortical and hippocampal neurons in the brain. The protein accumulations resemble twisted skeins of yarn — characteristic of ALS — and cause the degeneration of the neurons.
Researchers found ubiquilin2 in these skein-like accumulations in the spinal cords of ALS cases and in the brains of ALS/dementia cases.
The scientists also discovered mutations in ubiquilin2 in patients with familial ALS and familial ALS/dementia. But the skein-like accumulations were present in people’s brains and spinal cords in all forms of ALS and ALS/dementia, whether or not they had the gene mutation.
“This study provides robust evidence showing a defect in the protein degradation pathway causes neurodegenerative disease,” said Han-Xiang Deng, M.D., lead author of the paper and associate professor of neurology at the Feinberg School. “Abnormality in protein degradation has been suspected, but there was little direct evidence before this study.” The other lead author is Wenjie Chen, senior research technologist in neurology.
About 90 percent of ALS is sporadic, without any known cause, until this study. The remaining 10 percent is familial. To date, mutations in about 10 genes, several of which were discovered at Northwestern, including SOD1 and ALSIN, account for about 30 percent of classic familial ALS, noted Faisal Fecto, M.D., study co-author and a graduate student in neuroscience at Feinberg.
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Story Source:
The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by Northwestern University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
Journal Reference:
Han-Xiang Deng, Wenjie Chen, Seong-Tshool Hong, Kym M. Boycott, George H. Gorrie, Nailah Siddique, Yi Yang, Faisal Fecto, Yong Shi, Hong Zhai, Hujun Jiang, Makito Hirano, Evadnie Rampersaud, Gerard H. Jansen, Sandra Donkervoort, Eileen H. Bigio, Benjamin R. Brooks, Kaouther Ajroud, Robert L. Sufit, Jonathan L. Haines, Enrico Mugnaini, Margaret A. Pericak-Vance, Teepu Siddique. Mutations in UBQLN2 cause dominant X-linked juvenile and adult-onset ALS and ALS/dementia. Nature, 2011; DOI: 10.1038/nature10353