Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disease of the upper and lower motor neurons leading to death from respiratory failure. About 50% of patients die within 3 years of first symptoms, and 80% within 5 years. The disease typically affects individuals in middle and late life, with a peak age of onset being around 56 years, and it shows a slight male predominance. Although ALS affects one in every 300 people, its dreadful prognosis means that it appears to be a rare disease. To develop effective therapies, it is essential to understand what causes ALS. While a genetic contribution is known to play a role, growing evidence also points to the involvement of inflammation, cholesterol metabolism, and DNA and transcriptome damage. In my talk, I will explain how a combination of genetics, transcriptomics, epigenetics and epidemiology provides a clearer picture of the causes and modifiers of ALS, which helps us develop new approaches to treatment.
Methods for semi-automated hypothesis generation from scientific literature: an open science approach
The rapid growth of scientific publications makes it difficult to manually review and keep up to date with new research findings. Literature-based discovery (LBD) is a field of artificial intelligence at the intersection of natural language processing and machine...
