Make a Gift

ALS is a disease that creates immense challenges for our patients and their families. At the Eleanor and Lou Gehrig ALS Center at Columbia University, we provide the education, care, and support that is needed to meet these challenges and to help our patients live as long and as well with ALS as possible.

Our efforts rely on the generous support of organizations like the ALS Association, the Muscular Dystrophy Association, and Project ALS that provide the necessary resources we need to maintain our efforts on behalf of ALS patients and families throughout the New York metropolitan region and beyond. Our center also depends significantly on the generosity of those who themselves face the challenges of ALS and those who have lost loved ones to this unrelenting disease. Donations from individuals, family foundations, and community fundraising efforts support our clinical and research program and help us to move toward a greater understanding of ALS disease mechanisms, and the therapies that will undoubtedly follow.

We are particularly grateful to Dr. Leonard Tow and the Tow Foundation for a challenge grant made in 2016 in memory of his wife, Claire Tow.  This grant has helped to raise critical funds needed to build our center’s infrastructure and services.

Please join us in this endeavor by supporting The Eleanor and Lou Gehrig ALS Center.

Your Gift to the ALS Center Will:

  • Support the dedicated faculty and clinical staff members on whom our ALS patients and families depend for medical care, education, and social support, and expand our services to a greater number of ALS patients in and around New York City.
  • Enhance our ALS Precision Medicine Initiative that provides patients with genetic information that helps to explain the cause of their disease, and the risk to family members, while furthering our understanding of the mechanisms that lead to motor neuron disease. As novel gene therapy approaches to ALS emerge, we hope to act upon this genetic information to prevent the onset of symptoms, or to at least slow or arrest the progression of disease.
  • Create opportunities for scientists in the ALS Center, the Motor Neuron Center, the Institute for Genomic Medicine, and the Zuckerman Institute—each a key contributor to the integrated ALS research program at Columbia University. Funds raised will support pilot grants to drive discoveries in the biology of motor neuron disease, recruiting a broad range of investigators to study problems relevant to ALS.
  • Encourage new approaches to the treatment of ALS by supporting our ALS Clinical Trials and Experimental Therapeutics Program, and our Pre-Clinical Testing Core focused on the identification and validation of promising, candidate therapeutics for ALS. Our goal is to take advantage of our strengths in basic neurobiology at Columbia University to pursue science-based approaches to the treatment of ALS.
  • Enable the recruitment and retention of world-class physicians and scientists to strengthen Columbia’s commitment to finding a cure for ALS and related neurodegenerative disorders through a more complete understanding of motor neuron biology and disease.
  • Fund the training of young scientists—postdoctoral fellows and students—who are the driving force of ALS research at Columbia, and the future leaders of scientific progress that will defeat ALS.