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.
ALS-RAP
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.
The platform is comprised of world experts in research antibody generation and validation, including the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) and its associated labs at the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) McGill University in Montreal (Canada), the University of Oxford (UK), and the Karolinska Institute (Sweden).
Impact
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.
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. The existence of valid and high-quality antibodies contributes to the most accurate results in ALS research, which leads to a faster and greater understanding of the disease and potential therapeutics.
Notably, no form of intellectual property protection or patents will be filed for all new reproducible antibodies fully discovered and developed by ALS-RAP.
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 C9orf72 as part of his ALS Canada-funded project, Dr. Laflamme encountered a fundamental problem; that many commercially available C9orf72 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 YCharOS Inc., a registered charity owned by Agora Open Science Trust.
YCharOS Inc. is a Canadian, public interest, open science company with the mission of characterizing commercially available reagent antibodies for every human protein.
