Check out a write up here: www.ukdri.ac.uk/news-and-eve...

We are still investigating the mechanisms of protection as it may be more beneficial to mimic the effects of PUFAs in the brain using other means

We next need to determine whether a specific PUFA (there are several) is able to provide benefit on its own and then take forward to a clinical trial

Our data fits well with existing epidemiological studies from Alberto Ascherio @hsph.harvard.edu showing increased PUFA levels reduces risk for ALS and prolongs survival after onset e.g jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

This suggests that delivery of PUFAs to neurons in the brain is needed for them to exert their protective effect

So we next expressed a fatty acid desaturase enzyme, which generate PUFAs, only in the brain cells of our C9orf72 ALS flies and this time the improvement was much more dramatic. This approach also increased the survival of human C9orf72 patient neurons

We next wanted to test if restoring PUFAs would be beneficial. We found that increasing PUFAs through the diet only modestly extended survival of our C9orf72 ALS fly model

We initially found a deficit in PUFAs in C9orf72 patient neurons and a fruit fly model by measuring ~1400 different lipids with Martin Giera and @rikvanderkant.bsky.social