The ALS Association Presents The Sheila Essey Award for ALS Research

The ALS Association joins the American Academy of Neurology in presenting The 2007 Sheila Essey Award for ALS Research to Christopher E. Henderson, Ph.D., during the Academy's 59th Annual Meeting in Boston, April 30 through May 4.

Henderson, formerly at INSERM (France's Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale), and now at Columbia University in New York City, studies the way that nerve cells normally shut down in a process called programmed cell death and how that process interacts with the inflammation that accompanies the cell loss in neurodegenerative diseases. His investigations have been funded in the past by The ALS Association and have yielded important insight into why motor neurons die in the disease.

A professor of pathology and cell biology, Henderson's recent work with another devastating condition, called spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), is dovetailing with ongoing studies into the disease process of ALS.

?Dr. Henderson had made major contributions to the field during the past several years,? commented Lucie Bruijn, Ph.D., science director and vice president for The ALS Association, ?both in better understanding the disease and in providing clues for therapies.?

?As co-founder of Trophos, Henderson is an excellent example of a scientist who sees the bigger picture,? Bruijn noted. ?His expertise helped drive the development of motor neuron assays for drug discovery, which has led to a lead compound currently in clinical trials for ALS.?

Henderson was one of the pioneers to discover the helper molecules called trophic factors that support the growth and health of the motor neuron and its long fibers, the axons, which must travel up to a meter to reach muscle targets. He also revealed an important pathway that sends motor neurons to their death, if activated normally during development, or abnormally during diseases such as ALS, and is working to harness stem cells to the search for new therapeutics that might alter these pathways in the disease.

Programmed cell death, also called apoptosis, is a normal process that is operative early in development as the nervous system prunes excess connections to fine tune networks. The cell death process apparently can be set into play when a so-called death receptor is triggered by nitric oxide. While nitric oxide is a normal metabolic product, it appears to be able to initiate a particular death pathway specifically found in the motor neurons.

A vicious cycle appears to be able to develop within the motor neurons, progressively amplified, with increasing activation of cell death through nitric oxide. Henderson and colleagues detected an amplified nitric oxide response in mice with a mutation that produces many features of ALS, well before their symptoms became evident.

In keeping with scientists' growing appreciation of the role of surrounding cells in the demise of motor neurons in ALS, Henderson found that neighboring cells, the astrocytes and microglia, appear to pump out nitric oxide as well.

Ongoing studies in his lab and by others still need to clarify the role of nitric oxide and of inflammation in ALS, whether the process is harmful or in fact at some point might be aiding certain cells trying to survive the disease process.

Much of the groundwork for these discoveries was laid with funding from The ALS Association. Thomas Jessel, Ph.D., of Columbia University in New York, who co-chaired a symposium last year in Washington, D.C., at the meeting of the Society for Neuroscience at which Henderson presented his progress, noted that organizations such as The ALS Association and the SMA Foundation will be key players in funding further research and in moving discoveries such as these rapidly into the clinic.

Every year ALSA and AAN present the Essey Award to recognize and further the work of a leading researcher in the field. The $25,000 prize honors the memory of Sheila Essey and was made possible through the generosity of the Essey Family Fund. Past recipients have often used the funds to support post-doctoral research of promising young scientists on their teams.

For more information on ALS please visit http://www.alsa.org.

The nomination process and selection of the award winner is under the direction of the American Academy of Neurology as part of its annual Scientific Awards Program. The American Academy of Neurology, an association of more that 18,000 neurologists and neuroscience professionals, is dedicated to improving patient care through education and research. A neurologist is a doctor with specialized training in diagnosing, treating and managing disorders of the brain and nervous system such as stroke, Alzheimer's disease, epilepsy, Parkinson's disease, autism and multiple sclerosis. For more information about the American Academy of Neurology, visit its website at www.aan.com.

Members of the neuroscience community are encouraged to help AAN and ALSA honor one of their fellow colleagues who, like Henderson and such prior winners as Peter Carmeliet, M.D., Ph.D., Michael Strong, M.D., P. Nigel Leigh, M.D., Ph.D., Stanley Appel, M.D., and Don Cleveland, Ph.D., are making a significant impact on ALS research, perhaps opening doors to other research paths in understanding and solving the ALS puzzle.