ALS Association

 

 

The ALS Association and Teva Grant Two Awards as part of Teva CNS Target Identification Crowdsourcing Challenge

The ALS Association and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (“Teva”) have announced the recipients of the TEVA CNS Target Identification Crowdsourcing Challenge awards for their outstanding proposals to identify novel ALS targets. The two awards will be granted to Dr. Philip Wong, along with Dr. Jonathan C. Grima and Dr. Jeffrey D. Rothstein, all from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland.

To address the severe, unmet need for new therapies for disorders of the central nervous system, The ALS Association, the Huntington’s Disease Society of America (HDSA), and Teva launched The Teva CNS Target Identification Crowdsourcing Challenge to seek novel targets with therapeutic potential for treating neurodegenerative disease, pain, and migraine. The Challenge was launched in collaboration with InnoCentive, a global pioneer in innovation and crowdsourcing.

Two teams were selected by Teva and The ALS Association to each receive $10,000 for proposals of ALS targets that had been recently implicated in disease pathophysiology, and which were viewed as particularly interesting for exploration as therapeutic targets:

  1. Philip C. Wong, Ph.D., of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine for their project “TDP-43 dependent splicing repression as a mechanism-based therapeutic target for ALS.”
  2. Jonathan C. Grima, Ph.D., and Jeffrey D. Rothstein, M.D., Ph.D., of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine for their project “Targeting the nuclear pore in neurodegeneration.”

Learn more about these projects in the press release here.

“This is a particularly exciting time in drug development for ALS, with many novel therapeutic approaches under investigation,” said Dr. Lucie Bruijn, chief scientist for The ALS Association. “The ALS Association is pleased to recognize the two recipients of the Crowdsourcing Challenge, together with Teva, and look forward to the further development of these promising therapeutic targets.”