ALS Registry and Biorepository

The Registry and Biorepository of the ALS Center is a longitudinal effort of the ALS Center to collect, process, and store biofluids, including blood, tissue, and spinal fluid, along with detailed demographic and clinical information from ALS patients, pre-symptomatic carriers of ALS-causing mutations, and normal individuals. The primary goal of the program is to establish a stable resource for the study of disease mechanisms in sporadic and familial forms of ALS. This includes genomic studies to identify known or novel mutations that cause or influence one’s likelihood of developing ALS; the sequencing of RNAs isolated from ALS tissue to study molecular pathways that contribute to neurodegeneration; the generation of skin fibroblast and stem cell lines to create cellular models of disease; and the identification of biomarkers of disease onset and progression that might be used to measure the efficacy of candidate ALS therapies.