HMS Associate Professor of Neurology Seward Rutkove has won a $1 million challenge prize for developing a method that is expected to hasten the development of treatments for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a neuromuscular condition for which there are neither cures nor life-extending therapies.
Awarded Feb. 7 by the nonprofit Prize4Life, the ALS Biomarker Prize is among the largest in a recent wave of cash incentives offered by individuals and organizations to ignite scientific breakthroughs.
Rutkove’s innovation was to develop a reliable way to quantify the small muscular changes that signal progressive deterioration. Interestingly, he says, the technology itself is nothing new.
Rutkove, chief of the division of neuromuscular disease at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, worked with two Northeastern University physicists to reliably measure the health of a muscle using a technique called electrical impedance myography (EIM). EIM passes a tiny alternating electrical current through muscle, producing a small, measurable voltage.
“As the disease progresses,” Rutkove said, “the muscle atrophies, undergoing changes in composition and internal structure that alter the muscle’s electrical properties.”
Committed to curing ALS, Prize4Life was founded in 2005 by a group of Harvard Business School students after one, Avichai Kremer, was diagnosed with the disease. In 2006, the group launched the biomarker challenge to find a better method for assessing the disease’s rate of progression, with the goal to cut in half the cost of Phase II clinical trials.
Although the prize comes with no strings attached, Rutkove said he plans to put the funds to good use—freeing up his time for research and to support the company he has co-founded to make EIM technology widely available.
