Ice Bucket Challenge Leads to ALS Breakthrough, Researchers Announce

The Ice Bucket Challenge that flooded the Internet with videos of people getting drenched has led to a medical breakthrough.

Researchers have long known that a particular motor-neuron protein—named TDP-43—doesn’t function properly in 90 percent of ALS patients.

Now a grad student at Johns Hopkins Medical, in Baltimore, Maryland, is pretty sure he has figured out why. In experiments with mice, his team made a protein to mimic TDP-43, and after adding to the neurons, the cells came back to life.

“With any luck this could lead to the possibility of a cure or at least a slowing down of this terrible disease,” says pathobiology student Jonathan Ling. “We may soon be able to fix this in patients who have