Often Awesome

Today the ALS Community lost yet another member. Tim LaFollette, Mr. Often Awesome, has returned Home. My heart is with his wife Kaylan. While I initially hid my condition for over a year, Tim had the foresight and steel balls to create the Often Awesome video documentary series so that the entire world can see his decline as he battled this disease from start to finish. This is "Tuesdays With Morrie" on steroids -- a very intimate and detailed look into the horror and hope that is ALS. Not only did it show the effect on a young man cut down in the beginning of his prime, but it showed the devastating effect on family, friends, and community. One person may carry the disease, but many suffer irreversible collateral damage. People have told me how brave I am. However, compared to Tim, I merely dabble in ALS. He had the A4V inherited version, the worst and most aggressive possible. Whenever I would feel down about my situation, I would think about Tim and how he dealt with even worse with a fortitude and grace I cannot contemplate. I would like to thank him for unknowingly lending me some of his strength. I never met Tim personally, only having worked with him over Facebook on awareness and advocacy projects. When I heard the news this morning I shed exactly one tear. I then decided to more properly honor his memory by continuing to live with ALS as he did, on my own terms. I also intend to honor Tim by winning my battle and, like he did, help others win theirs. Fuck ALS.

Common Cause?

A sensational bit of news has begun spreading across the ALS Community: A common cause for all forms of ALS has been found!

But has it? Certainly it is a common process but is it really the cause?

The process involved is autophagy. One of the important jobs of autophagy is to break down and recycle misfolded (improperly constructed) proteins marked by another protein called ubiquitin. A proteasome then breaks down the protein into amino acids which are then used to build new proteins It's like tearing a house apart, timber by timber, and reconstructing another from the material. If this process is interrupted or incomplete then you have a pile of junk left laying around which is thought to impede the efficient operation of the cell. An example of this is the amyloid plaques that are thought to cause Alzheimer's. However, removal of those plaques did not affect disease progression.

ALS is now strongly considered to be a "non-cell-autonomous" disease. This means that something outside the cell is causing the disease. Some of the most persuasive evidence for this is a recent study involving cells known as astrocytes become toxic to the motor neurons. This happens in both the inherited form (familial or FALS) and the more common sporadic form (SALS). Previous readers will know about my interest in current research regarding neuroinflammation as a primary cause of ALS and other neurodegenerative disease. This is also a common cause from a variety of triggers. It is, however, upstream of the "cause" identified in the recent news.

The calcium influx from the excitotoxicity created by neuroinflammation damages the mitochondria. In fact, this is a primary event. It is known that the motor neurons "die-back" along the axon, and that mitochondria motility down the axon is one of the first problems in ALS and neuroinflammation models. Once the mitochondria are damaged and cannot be repaired/replaced, pretty much all bets are off inside the cell. The cell becomes starved for energy, the cellular machinery (such as proteasomes) begins to fail, and the mitochondria start producing apoptotic factors which leads to cell death. Normally this wouldn't be a problem as many of the cells in the human body die and are simply replaced (even brain cells). However, the motor neurons you are born with are the very same motor neurons you die with.

I therefore posit that this "common cause of ALS" is too downstream of the actual cause for treatment based solely on it to be effective in and of itself. It's like trying to stop a waterfall at the edge of the cliff rather than building a dam in the stream a mile further behind. I do believe that although this may not lead directly to a single effective treatment, it would nearly certainly be an important part of a "cocktail therapy". The major positive I take away from this is that it answers the question whether the SOD1 model is applicable to all forms of ALS.

Chatterbug

Since I lost the ability to travel and talk, I use Instant Messaging to keep in touch with family and friends all over the world. Everybody seems to have their favorite client, be it MSN, Yahoo, AIM, or Google. Rather than try to force everyone to switch to a client program of my choosing, I installed all of the various programs and created accounts (I did force some to stop using Facebook chat because it doesn't play nicely with my system). This was fine and dandy, but now my boot load time was obnoxiously long and my computer's RAM was getting low, leading to performance issues. Luckily I had bumped my system up to 4GB in anticipation of my higher-than-normal demands. This led me to search for an alternative, where I could combine most or all of my clients into one ("One client to rule them all, one client to find them..."). Prior to disease, most all my computer systems in the house ran Linux. On my personal laptop I used a program called Pidgin which talked to all the major IM services. The Windows port I found a little lacking and probably not a great fit for most users. A friend then suggested Trillian. I installed it, ran through the setup to fill in the login information for my various IM accounts, and launched the application. I was impressed with the sleek interface. All chat sessions are in one tabbed window. The settings are easy to use and customize. And my RAM usage dropped by about half a GB! Trillian doesn't support all of the functionality of the native clients such as video/audio chat and sometimes the file transfer isn't available, but for regular text chat (including the overly-cute emoticons) it works great. If I need the other functions I just pop up the native client and close it when I'm done. To save boot time and RAM I disabled the natives from loading at boot. It also supports a Facebook connection but I found the newsfeed to be annoying; I prefer to leave Facebook on the web browser where it belongs. I would also caution about security: Your IM logins and conversations are not encrypted or secure and possibly subject to inspection by 3rd parties (also quite possible on the natives), so be aware that transmitting sensitive information over this is not advised. If you are a chatterbug like me, I recommend using Trillian on your AAC computer. I would even recommend it for non-disabled people.

G-Whiz

Holy dancing cow! Today I was playing with my Google account and finally set up a G-Mail account. I then noticed a "Call Phone" link that connected me to Google Voice. While this isn't new by any means, since it was free for USA domestic and Canada, I decided to install the web browser add-on. Within a few minutes I was placing phone calls to friends. Imagine their surprise... The default setup comes across as "CLIENT_ONLY" which might be ignored by people with Caller-ID (most of my calls went to voicemail at first). So a few more minutes later I had "upgraded" my Google Voice account with a brand new mobile phone number in my desired area-code and linked it to my house land-line so people can call me if I am offline. Calls to my Google Voice number which go to voicemail are placed in an inbox I can access via my Google Voice or email. The voice quality on both ends was reported to be quite good. Calls were very easy for me to make. I cued up my opening lines so that as soon as the remote end answered I could hit "Speak" on my assisted communication device and identify myself. I had originally intended to use this in emergencies if I couldn't otherwise alert a caregiver (note that this is NOT suitable for dialing 9-1-1) but after my test calls went so well I decided that I have a "new" communication method for talking to my more patient friends. I had used Skype in the past, but Skype is only free for computer-to-computer calls, not to regular cell or land-line phones. I was able to do all of this with my eye-tracking system with relative ease. If you have control over your eye-tracking assisted communication device and can install software, I recommend trying this out to see if it works for you. UPDATE: Configuration instructions are in the Comments section.

Jury Duty

As many of you know, I have two previous posts about a drug in trial called NP001 (see "Salty Dog" and "All Roads"). In the past few days ALSA released a statement about this trial. I thank ALSA for doing this service for pals in spreading the word about this trial. Recent research seems to finally hold real promise of effective treatment for ALS, the realization of over a century of work. However, until we have the hard data all we have is promise and hope (which while powerful are still ineffective treatments for real disease). It is the responsibility of eligible PALS to become "jurors" in these trials and help us all to find the facts which can free us from the death sentence which Fate has issued.

Brainstorm Coming

Some more very good news for PALS in the USA: Brainstorm is bringing it's stem cell clinical trial to the US! This technology, named NurOwn, uses a patient's own mesenchymal stem cells to produce little factories for neurotrophic factors (proteins that nourish and strengthen neurons). This would provide a constant and lifetime production of support for the neighboring neurons, a much more effective approach than drugs which are only present for a short time or may be reduced or blocked by the Blood-Brain-Barrier. Note that this is not a replacement therapy, but rather one to help feed and protect existing neurons. You can read about the trial protocol here. For recently diagnosed patients they will inject into muscles to try to take advantage of axonal uptake in the hope that this will preserve the axon and its attachment to the muscle (neuromuscular junction). Patients in later stages of disease will have an injection into the spine to treat the neurons' cell bodies directly.

All Roads

It has been known for some time that chronic neuroinflammation is a primary driver of disease in ALS and its "cousins" Alzheimers, Parkinsons, etc. Many attempts have been made to address it by using anti-inflammation drugs without success. Recently a study was published using a "prodrug" in animal models of Alzheimer's and Huntington's diseases. In this study, the drug 2-(3,4-dimethoxybenzenesulfonylamino)-4-(3-nitrophenyl)-5-(piperidin-1-yl)methylthiazole (JM6) inhibited the action of KMO, which is involved in the metabolism of tryptophan. This causes tryptophan to metabolize into kynurenic acid (KYNA), a neuroprotective substance, instead of quinolinic acid (QUIN), a neurotoxic substance. This degradation of tryptophan is called the kynurenine pathway (KP). It is one of the major regulatory pathways of the immune response and is known to be active in neuroinflammation. In HD, AD, and PD (Parkinson) there is decreased KYNA and increased QUIN. In multiple studies, changing the KYNA/QUIN balance in favor of KYNA is neuroprotective via a variety of methods.

Of interest to the ALS Community is that the same imbalances are seen in ALS. Strong evidence suggests that dysregulation of the KP leads to the type of neuronal damage from chronic neuroinflammation seen in many neurodegenerative diseases. In vitro testing with rodent motor neuron cells revealed a functional KP, that degeneration increased with duration and magnitude of exposure of QUIN, and that KYNA was protective against damage to neurons. It is known that QUIN is an NMDA receptor agonist (activator) and that KYNA is an antagonist (inhibitor). NMDA receptor-mediated excitotoxicity via calcium (Ca+) influx is a known cause of motor neuron death in ALS. This means that inhibition of KMO (aka kynurenine 3-hydroxylase) should be beneficial in ALS as well. Fortunately, K3H/KMO has been characterized for some time. In a study done in 2000, KMO (referred to as K3H) was found to be inhibited by Cl- (chloride). Luckily for PALS, there is already a chlorine drug in trial. This drug creates Taurine Chloramine (TauCl) which modulates the pro-inflammatory response seen in ALS, and also appears capable of rerouting KP to a beneficial product rather than harmful.

From the above it appears that previous attempts at modulating neuroinflammation failed because they were targeting symptoms rather than underlying cause (like treating a headache with aspirin when the cause is a tumor). By boosting the body's endogenous TauCl production a clearly malfunctioning immune response can be guided to its secondary, nurturing, state. At the same time, multiple targets identified in ALS can be struck with a single weapon: Excitotoxic calcium influx from glutamate receptors (currently treated with little effect by Riluzole), mitochondrial distress (currently the target of other drugs in trial), and the neuroinflammation which is one of the main drivers of disease progression in ALS.

While all roads may lead to Rome, it appears that in neurodegenerative disease they may lead to KP moderation by chloramines.