Ice Bucket Challenge leads to ALS breakthrough
By Joe Tacosik
Two years after the viral social media challenge, the ALS Association announces a groundbreaking gene discovery.
Remember that Ice Bucket Challenge your relatives or friends on Facebook kept asking you to do in 2014? The viral social trend challenging people to either dump a massive bucket of ice cold water over their own heads, or donate to the ALS Association (or both)?
According to CNN, the challenge led to over 17 million users taking part in the viral videos, including many famous celebrities and athletes.
And now, after raising more than $100 million in contributions, it turns out the money led to a groundbreaking discovery of a gene that helps in the treatment of the often-deadly disease that affects neurons in the brain and spinal cord.
The findings, which were detailed in a published piece this week by Nature Genetics, found NEK1, a gene that “provides another potential target for therapy development, and brings scientists one step closer to treating the neurological disorder.”
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“The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge enabled the ALS Association to invest in Project MinE’s work to create lare birepositories of ALS biosamples,” Dr. Luce Bruijin, Chief Scientist at the ALS Association said. “[These] are designed to allow exactly this kind of research and to produce exactly this kind of result.”
This is the third gene of its kind that has been discovered using the money raise by the Ice Bucket Challenge.
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