Hereditary Disease Foundation Announces $1.5 Million in Grants and Fellowships to Support Huntington’s Disease Research
NEW YORK (Oct. 8, 2020) - The Hereditary Disease Foundation (HDF), which funds research to find treatments and cures for the devastating genetic disorder Huntington’s disease, is awarding $1.5 million in grants and postdoctoral fellowships to 17 scientists to support projects that focus on Huntington’s and may also have implications for other neurodegenerative disorders, such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and Lou Gehrig’s disease. Huntington’s disease causes irreversible declines in control of mood, memory, and movement. There is currently no cure.
“Each year the Hereditary Disease Foundation Scientific Advisory Board reviews research applications focused on Huntington’s disease from around the world and selects the most cutting edge and promising projects to fund,” said Dr. Anne B. Young, Chair of the HDF Scientific Advisory Board and Vice Chair of the HDF Board of Directors. “We are thrilled to announce these new awards to brilliant scientists conducting game-changing research.”
The 2020 recipients and their projects are:
Osama Al-Dalahmah, Columbia University Medical Center
Studying Huntington’s disease astrocytes in different parts of the brain: A regional study of the landscape of gene expression at the single cell level
Cheryl Arrowsmith, University of Toronto
Unravelling the connections between the Huntington’s disease protein and our genetic material
Abdellatif Benraiss, University of Rochester
White matter role in the pathology of Huntington's disease
Veronica Ines Brito, University of Barcelona – Instituto de Neurosciencias, Spain
Exploring the role of RNA editing on the generation of pathogenic huntingtin fragments
Ali Khoshnan, California Institute of Technology
Developing gut-based therapies for Huntington’s disease
Ryan Lim, University of California, Irvine
Interactions between metabolism, gene expression, and gender in Huntington’s disease
Roy Maimon, Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, University of California, San Diego
Therapy development for Huntington’s disease using in vivo conversion of astrocytes into striatal neurons
A. Jenny Morton, University of Cambridge
Can core body temperature be used as a readout for changes in metabolism in Huntington’s disease?
Daniel O’Reilly, University of Massachusetts Medical School
Understanding the role of aggregates in Huntington's disease
Jennie C. Lacour Roy, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School
Testing of novel drugs targeting CAG repeat expansions as candidate therapeutics for Huntington's disease
David M. Sabatini, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Using metabolism to measure defects in cellular self-cleaning in Huntington’s disease
Joan Steffan, University of California, Irvine
Identification of Huntingtin-dependent cellular trash collection pathways
Xiao Sun, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
Mutant huntingtin promotes CAG repeat expansion
Nicholas Todd, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School
Improving delivery of Huntington’s disease therapies to the brain
Jean Paul G. Vonsattel and Richard A. Hickman, Columbia University Irving Medical Center
Human tissue banking for the Huntington’s disease research community
Ai Yamamoto, Columbia University
Determining how the protein Alfy may improve Huntington’s disease-like symptoms
Michael Zody, New York Genome Center
New York Genome Center Huntington’s Disease Brain Genotyping Project
About Huntington’s Disease
Each child of a parent affected with Huntington’s disease has a 50% risk of inheriting the same lethal affliction. The disease usually appears in the prime of life – age 30-50 – but it can strike as early as 2 or as old as 80. It is invariably fatal over 10 to 20 years. Most individuals in the late stages of the disease lose the ability to walk, talk and feed themselves, but are still aware of themselves and their families. Since Huntington’s disease is caused by a single gene, it serves as a model to potentially unlock cures for other brain disorders such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and Lou Gehrig’s (ALS) diseases.
About the Hereditary Disease Foundation
The Hereditary Disease Foundation (HDF) facilitates collaborative and innovative scientific research to further the understanding of Huntington’s disease, a genetic disorder that strikes in early- to mid-adulthood, destroying brain cells and bringing on severe and progressive declines in personality, cognitive ability, and mobility. As a disease caused by a mistake on a single gene, Huntington’s disease serves as an ideal model for understanding other brain disorders. Research organized by the Foundation led to the discovery of the genetic marker for Huntington’s disease in 1983. HDF organized and funded a decade-long international collaboration of over 100 scientists who discovered the gene that causes Huntington’s in 1993. This work played an important role in the development of the Human Genome Project. For information, visit http://www.hdfoundation.org.