Brother's Passion Brings New Hope In ALS Fight
ALS-TDI Is World's Largest ALS Drug Discovery Program

POSTED: 4:12 pm EDT August 30, 2007
UPDATED: 6:10 pm EDT August 30, 2007


BOSTON -- At the ALS Therapy Development Institute in Cambridge, there's hope for a cure and treatments thanks to a multimillion dollar partnership with the Muscular Dystrophy Association.

Seven years ago, when Stephen Heywood, 29, was diagnosed with ALS, his brother, Jamie, embarked on his own passionate search for a cure. The ALS Therapy Development Institute, or ALS-TDI, was born from that passion.

"I think TDI has been, from the very beginning since my brother's diagnosis, has been a place where families affected by a disease can hire the best scientists from industry to find an answer for them in the most effective way," Jamie Heywood said. "Today in the partnership with the MDA and (Augie's Quest Initiative), that has expanded."


Fitness pioneer Augustine Nieto started Augie's Quest after he was diagnosed with ALS.

Thanks to funding from the MDA and Augie's Quest, ALS-TDI has become the world's largest ALS drug discovery program aimed at finding treatments. The MDA will fund at least $18 million into the project over the next three years.

"My goal is to find out what causes ALS," Neito said. "I chose to partner with MDA because every place I visited, MDA was the leader."

"We are going to look at every facet of this disease with no predisposition or bias as to what's actually causing the disease. We're going to tie biomarkers and target information from the human disease to the animal disease and then figure the most expedient fashion to get drugs into the clinic," said Sean Scott, ALS-TDI president.

Researchers have hit the ground running, capitalizing on key advances already made since ALS-TDI's creation. The advances has led to more hope than ever before.

"We have a drug-screening program that has evaluated over the last five years evaluated about 800 drugs, tested drugs in about 22,000 animals in about 150 different animal studies," Scott said.

"The hope I feel for what can happen over the next five to seven years is really significant. There has never been this amount of resources brought to bear in this focused a manner in ALS, or actually, in any neuromuscular disease. So I think that we have not yet begun to see what can happen when you bring this kind of power," Heywood said.

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