$75,000 awarded to Abdullah Ishaque, an MD/PhD student, in Dr. Sanjay Kalra’s lab at the University of Alberta.
A biological marker, or “biomarker” for short, is a measurable indicator associated with a disease state that helps determine risk, severity and response to therapy. For example, the level of cholesterol in the blood is a biomarker for the risk of heart disease and is used as an indicator of response to cholesterol-lowering drugs.
Today, biomarkers are being incorporated into an increasing number of clinical trials. They can help advance drug development by providing researchers a way to monitor disease progression and by helping to identify and enroll people who are most likely to respond to a new treatment. In comparison to clinical trials that include people with many disease variations in one group, enrolling only those likely to respond can help researchers discover whether a therapy works in a faster and more effective way.
Validated biomarkers for ALS are urgently needed to help researchers develop a path to unique treatments for each person living with ALS. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has emerged as a promising source of non-invasive biomarkers for ALS. Abdullah Ishaque, working with his PhD supervisor Dr. Sanjay Kalra, has recently developed two imaging biomarkers called texture analysis (TA) and quantitative T2 (qT2) mapping. TA measures subtle patterns and relationships in brain images and qT2 allows researchers to evaluate degeneration in the brain by analyzing water content, iron content, demyelination (damage to the outer protective covering of motor neurons) and inflammation.
In this project, Ishaque will investigate whether these two imaging biomarkers can monitor degeneration in the brain, upper motor neuron dysfunction and disease progression associated with ALS in people living with the disease. To validate his findings, he will also perform MRI scans on post-mortem tissue samples donated generously from people who had ALS and compare results with other measures of disease progression in the samples including neuron loss, changes to glial cells and demyelination.
For his work, Ishaque will be using brain MRI images obtained from the Canadian ALS Neuroimaging Consortium (CALSNIC), a project that was funded through the largest grant given through the ALS Canada-Brain Canada Foundation partnership with money raised through the Ice Bucket Challenge.