This partnership brings together antibody experts from institutions all over the world, to support the creation of an open-access pipeline to validate antibody research and provide the ALS research community with the highest quality reliable, renewable antibodies for ALS genes.
Overview
ALS-RAP was created as a public-private partnership by three leading ALS charities – the ALS Association (USA), the Motor Neurone Disease Association (UK), and the ALS Society of Canada.
Outcomes
Increasing the success of future drug discovery
ALS-RAP was formed to ensure the availability of the highest quality, validated antibodies developed using standard operating procedures that will be openly shared with the ALS research community.
Notably, no form of intellectual property protection or patents will be filed for all new reproducible antibodies fully discovered and developed by ALS-RAP.
This collaborative effort, based on open science and complete freedom to operate, will ensure the use of the highest-quality tools to increase the success of future drug discovery.
ALS-RAP timeline
The timeline traces the evolution of ALS-RAP, born out of the necessity to tackle challenges in protein detection. Collaborative investments drove its growth, leading to the transformation of ALS-RAP into YCharOS Inc., dedicated to characterizing antibodies for human proteins.
2016
ALS Canada supported researcher Carl Laflamme.
While working on C90RF72 as part of his ALS Canada-funded project, Dr. Laflamme encountered a fundamental problem; that many commercially available C90RF72 antibodies were ineffective at detecting the correct protein. This catalyzed the creation of the ALS Reproducible Antibody Platform (ALS-RAP).
2018
ALS Canada partnered with the ALS Association (ALSA) and the Motor Neurone Disease Association (MND Association) to invest $600,000 USD in support of (ALS-RAP).
2021
ALS-RAP evolved into a company wholly-owned by the Agora Open Science Trust, a registered charity — YCharOS Inc.
YCharOS Inc. is a Canadian, public interest, open science company with the mission of characterizing commercially available reagent antibodies for every human protein.
ALS Canada partnered with the ALS Association (ALSA) and the Motor Neurone Disease Association (MND Association) to invest $600,000 USD in support of (ALS-RAP).
