Assistive technology can provide a major benefit to people living with ALS and their caregivers. That is why some of the advances we have seen in recent years, thanks to generous donations from the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge and beyond, are so exciting.

The ALS Association is hosting ALS Community Workshop: Developing Drugs for Treatment, Guidance for Industry on July 12 in Washington, D.C., and the entire ALS community is invited. The goal of the workshop will be to provide targeted feedback and information to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from people with ALS, caregivers, and stakeholders to inform revisions of the FDA’s Draft Guidance on ALS Drug Development.

Researchers funded by The ALS Association, through donations from the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, discovered new evidence on the role that mutant TDP-43 plays in development and progression of the disease. This important work sheds light on novel aspects of TDP-43 biology and provides valuable tools to gain insight into early stages of ALS disease progression and could lead to the development of new therapies.

In recognition of ALS Awareness Month, we’ve been sharing a lot of new stories about people living with the disease and their caregivers, the volunteers and health care providers who help make the lives of people with ALS better, the powerful fundraisers and the participants in Walk to Defeat ALS and Team Challenge ALS events, and the researchers fighting for a cure. This is the 14th profile in that series.

“I raise my voice for the people who can’t. Someone I love was affected by ALS, so it affected me as well. I say what I [feel] the people who lost their communication abilities would want to be said,” 13-year-old Sophie Rubin said.

Erin Brady Worsham, an award-winning artist based in Nashville who has lived with ALS for more than 24 years, takes her philosophy about life from golf.

Bad things happen to good people every day. That’s just the nature of life. But it doesn’t mean we stop living and loving. My ALS story officially started on a warm fall afternoon in September 2001. I had been having difficulties with speaking and swallowing for several months. After more than two months of seeing about a dozen different medical professionals, and having more tests than one can imagine, I sat in the small examination room of a local neurologist.

Treeway, a biotech company in the Netherlands with a mission to develop a cure for ALS, recently announced promising results of its phase I trial of its lead drug, TW001. TW001 is an oral formulation of edaravone. Radicava®, the most recently FDA approved drug to treat ALS, is an intravenous version of edaravone. The study showed that TW001 was well tolerated and stable, while improving bioavailability compared to Radicava.

Dawn & Nash are a husband and wife duo called “Dawn Loves Nash.” They’re also artists who are living and sharing their “hippie gypsy pop” music in and around Nashville, Tenn. Influenced by Sting, John Denver, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Fleetwood Mac, Willie Nelson, and Patsy Cline, Dawn Loves Nash aspires to help others through music.

Margot Vaughan has been fighting ALS for more than two years. But she hasn’t been fighting alone. “My family is totally devoted to me,” Margot said. “They keep me going and I’m lucky and grateful to have such an amazing family by my side.”

“If I have to be the face of ALS,” Donna Boring said, “it’s not a bad face to have.” Donna was diagnosed with ALS in 2008, at the age of 37. She is one of the heroes in The ALS Association’s new public service announcement (PSA) campaign showing “The Reality of ALS.”

unded by The ALS Association, NeuroBANK™ is the patient-centric platform for clinical research for numerous Association programs developed by the Neurological Clinical Research Institute (NCRI) at Massachusetts General Hospital. The platform received the Best Practices Award for Personalized & Translational Medicine at the 2018 Bio-IT World Conference and Expo in Boston earlier this month.

My name’s Aaron, but my friends call me “Bankz.” I’m a 39-year-old husband to Abbie and father to seven-month-old Lincoln. It was a real shock when I received my ALS diagnosis less than six months ago. But now that I’ve had some time to let things sink in, it’s time to make some noise.

A recent study led by Dr. Bjorn Oskarsson from the Mayo Clinic Jacksonville and supported by The ALS Association demonstrated that mexiletine, a drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, reduced the frequency and severity of muscle cramps in people with ALS compared to a placebo.

Studies have shown the value of attending a multidisciplinary clinic for a person with ALS, including longer survival, increased quality of life, and improved access to potential therapies. Since 1998, The ALS Association’s national Certified Treatment Centers of Excellence (CTCEs) network has provided ALS care and services in a supportive atmosphere, with an emphasis on hope and quality of life.

The ALS Association is happy to continue our tradition of supporting bright, young scientists in ALS research through our Milton Safenowitz Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. These awards encourage young scientists to enter and, importantly, to remain in the ALS field.

We’d like to extend a huge thank you to the more than 570 ALS Advocates who participated in our 2018 National ALS Advocacy Conference in Washington, D.C., this week. Nearly every state in the country was represented and nearly half of the participants were attending for the first time.

The ALS Association is happy to continue our tradition of supporting bright, young scientists in ALS research through our Milton Safenowitz Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. These awards encourage young scientists to enter and, importantly, to remain in the ALS field.

Each year we go to Capitol Hill to ask for federal funding for ALS research. We ask members to support appropriations for the National ALS Registry at the Centers for Disease Control, the ALS Research Program at the Department of Defense, and ALS research being done through the National Institutes of Health.

Jason Walker believes his greatest accomplishments have come since his diagnosis with ALS – specifically, being a husband and a father. He met his wife, Annie, three years into his ALS diagnosis and they started dating a year later. They were married in 2014.

Thirty-seven-year-old Melissa is a mother to Anthony (14) and Lauren (9). She’s been living with ALS for two years. “I can’t say that I parent any different [since being diagnosed with ALS],” Melissa said. “As a parent, you have to pick and choose your battles and I’ve never been one to sweat the small stuff. But I can see how much my diagnosis has made my children grow and mature.”