Dr. Christen Shoesmith is the Director of the Motor Neuron Disease Clinic, a member of the London Health Sciences Centre, as well as a member of the Client Services Advisory Council and co-investigator for two ALS Canada clinical research fellowship grants. She is also the chair of the ALS Best Practice Recommendations.
Why is donor support so critical?
I think it’s so important to be able to continue to support the research. We are getting closer to treatments for this disease and closer to understanding the disease but without consistent and ongoing funding, we might get stalled. We are feeling that we’re so close, so we just need more funding to make sure that we can get over those hurdles to get to those treatments that I really feel are just around the corner.
We really have made a number of discoveries and a lot of advances over the last several years, certainly in my short time in the ALS field. And I truly feel that in the next 12 years, we will have effective therapies for this disease. But without the funding, we might be slower than those 12 years and that might push it out to 20 years or 25 years.
For the families suffering from this disease, we cannot afford to make that time course that long. We need to do the research now so that we can shorten that time and develop the treatments.