The “TUDCA-ALS Kick-off meeting” will be held on Thursday 8 and Friday 9 February at Humanitas University: a meeting of the leading experts at international level for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) will be held to start experimentation with a new drug against this neurodegenerative disease for which currently there is no cure.
The meeting will officially launch the organization of the international clinical study coordinated by Humanitas, the first out of 127 participants in the Horizon 2020 call for proposals for rare diseases and orphan drugs, supported with about 5.6 million euros by the European Commission. Major international scholars of ALS will attend the meeting including specialists from Italy, Ireland, Great Britain, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Belgium.
ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease (named after a 30’s baseball player whose disease raised public attention), is a progressive neurodegenerative disease of adulthood, caused by the loss of spinal, bulb and cortical motor neurons, which leads to paralysis of voluntary muscles to the point of involving even respiratory ones.
The evaluation of a new drug
Professor Alberto Albanese, Head of Neurology at Humanitas explains: “The study led by Humanitas will last four years and will make it possible to evaluate the therapeutic efficacy in the treatment of ALS of a new drug derived from bile acids, Tauroursodeoxycholic Acid (TUDCA). At the moment the only treatment for ALS is only able to slow the progression of the disease: there is no real cure. The new drug derived from bile acids has already demonstrated, in a first exploratory work on 60 patients, to prevent degeneration of motor neurons affected by the disease, slowing by about a third the neuronal degenerative process and thus allowing an extension of the survival of patients.
Coordinated by the Humanitas research group of Professor Alberto Albanese, the project involves not only Italian researchers from the Istituto Superiore di Sanità and the Bruschettini company of Genoa, but also scholars from the Universität Ulm (Germany), the University of Sheffield (United Kingdom), the Hôpital Universitaire de Tours (France), the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), the Universitair Medisch Centrum Utrecht (Netherlands), Trinity College Dublin (Ireland). The Motor Neuron Disease Association of Northampton (UK) is also part of the study, a patient association that confirms the primary role played by associations in this type of disease.
