According to the researchers, the popular Ice Bucket Challenge, or rather, the funds collected with its help, helped to unravel one of the mysteries of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis - a disease that the scientist Stephen Hawking suffers from.
The Ice Bucket Challenge made a lot of noise in its day. The aim of the campaign was to raise public awareness of a disease such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Recall that the famous British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking suffers from this very disease. Donations from the action were used to research the disease. The action itself looked like this: a man who drenches himself, donates ten dollars to the charitable foundation ALS Association and challenges three other participants. If they refuse, they must make a donation of $ 100.
Today ALS Association presented the results of the research to the world, which became possible thanks to the collected funds. The members of the organization said that in total they managed to raise more than $ 100 million and this money was distributed among several groups of scientists. One of these groups was Project MinE, which made an important discovery. It turned out that single mutations in the NEK1 gene are associated with the development of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. In total, the researchers studied and compared the genomes of over fifteen thousand victims of the disease, as well as their relatives who do not suffer from this disease.
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is a slowly progressive, incurable degenerative disease of the central nervous system. It is deadly: death of a person is caused by respiratory tract infections or failure of the respiratory muscles.
According to scientists, the findings suggest that the Ice Bucket Challenge was not just a flash mob, but brought real benefits to science. The results obtained will help in the fight against serious illness.