PROVIDENCE – With more than $100 million raised nationally in less than a month to support research by the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, the viral fund-raiser has raced across the world’s social media consciousness much like a stadium wave sweeping Fenway Park.

But when the president of Brown University President Christina Paxson, surrounded by neuroscientists involved in the actual research on the disease, took on the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, it added a whole new dimension: it was spurred on by the actual researchers who are working on decoding the mysteries of the fatal disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Paxson had accepted the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge from Massachusetts Institute of Technology President L. Rafael Reif.

On the Brown University green, with the seven-foot bronze Brown Bear statue bearing witness, the bucket of ice water was applied by Diane Lipscombe, a Neuroscience professor and co-director of the Brown Institute for Brian Science Center for Neurobiology of Cells and Circuits.

“By doing this,” Paxson said, “ I hope we can spur the research that is needed to find a cure for ALS,” which she described as a “progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects too many people in a really awful way.”

In turn, Paxson challenged the following people: Maahika Srinivasan of the Brown Undergraduate Council of Students; Kate Burton, Brown alumna and star of stage and screen [“I really want to see her with ice water on her head,” Paxson quipped]; University of Rhode Island President David Dooley and Rhode Island College President Nancy Carriuolo [“Two collaborators in medical education and research…”]; and Brown alumnus, former Dartmouth College President and World Bank President Jim Yong Kim.

[See link to video of challenge below.]

Ongoing research
Four different labs at Brown University are working on different models of ALS to try to understand the basic mechanisms that underlie motor neuron degeneration and destabilization of nerve muscle transmission, according to Lipscombe.

The work is being led by Brown professors Kristi Wharton, Robert Reenan, Anne Hart and Lispcombe.

“Kristi Wharton [who also took the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge along with Paxson] and Robert Reenan, [working with a grant from the ALS Association], are using the fruit fly drosophila, which the Reenan lab have engineered to carry human ALS-causing mutations in specific genes,” Lipscombe told ConvergenceRI.

The Wharton lab is studying the properties of the nerve to muscle signaling and some of that work is in collaboration with Lipscombe’s lab. The student doing the work in that lab is Aaron Held [who also took the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge in the video].

Lipscombe continued: “Anne Hart and her lab are using the nematode C. elegans that were also engineered to carry human ALS causing mutant genes. She and I plan to collaborate to study the nerve to muscle signaling in these nematodes.”

All four labs received gifts from the DEARS Foundation to develop these models of ALS.