David Walk
University of Minnesota, MN·Medicine & Clinical Research
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a disease in which the nerve cells that control muscles progressively die, causing disability and, eventually, death. Available treatments give only modest benefit.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Neuroscience
- Topics
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
motor neuron disease
neurodegeneration
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Record baseline features of people with ALS, including disease phenotype, genetic testing results and serum neurofilament light (NfL), a blood marker of nerve damage, across 9 multidisciplinary ALS clinics.
- Track progression over time with validated measures including the ALSFRS-R functional rating scale, disease staging, respiratory vital capacity, speaking rate and a 10-meter walk test.
- Capture disease milestones such as gastrostomy, hospitalization and death from patient-reported outcomes and durable medical equipment orders recorded in the electronic health record.
- Model time to key ALS milestones using baseline characteristics plus retrospective and prospective longitudinal clinic data, and share the datasets with academic and industry investigators.
More about the research
One obstacle to developing better drugs is limited knowledge of ALS natural history, meaning how the disease typically unfolds over time. Existing registries either include many patients with little clinical detail, cover only small subsets of patients, or follow people for a short period.
Why it matters
A clearer picture of how ALS progresses in a broad, representative patient population could help clinicians counsel patients, help trial designers choose endpoints and eligibility criteria, and help evaluate therapies after approval. Because enrollment is open to nearly all patients seen in participating clinics, the shared dataset may better represent the full range of people living with ALS.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Zuoshang Xu
University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, MA·Neuroscience
Map which spinal cord proteins are citrullinated and how this changes across disease stages, using proteomics in SOD1 G93A and PFN1 C71G ALS mouse models.
Jennifer Yokoyama
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Establish ASAC-specific diagnostic cutoffs for four plasma Alzheimer's biomarkers: Aβ42/40 and Tau-181 (markers of Alzheimer's protein pathology), neurofilament light (nerve fiber injury), and GFAP (astrocyte activation), using samples from the multi-center ACAD cohort.
Luke Judge
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Genetics
Test allele-specific genome editing against two different dominant CMT2E mutations and develop rigorous phenotypic assays of therapeutic benefit in motor neurons derived from patient-modeled human induced pluripotent stem cells.
The school
University of Minnesota: 88 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 722 research doctorates a year.
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