The Michelle Gargaro Foundation’s fundraising efforts are off and running.  

Our foundation hosted a successful kickoff event on Saturday, September 11, 2021.  The event was attended by close to 60 people.  Donations at the event brought in just over $3,000.00 to help in our battle against ALS.

A big thanks to all who attended the event and to those who have donated in support of our efforts.  Photos and additional information about the kickoff event will appear soon.

 

Ryan Stauff at the ALS Association

The Michelle Gargaro Foundation recently provided a $2,000 gift to The ALS Association in support of ALS research. This gift will help fund critical research aimed at identifying new treatments that can lead to a cure and is happening in our region, including the following:
 
Healey Platform Trial
The first-ever HEALEY ALS Platform Trial seeks to speed up the research process by allowing scientists to test multiple ALS drugs at the same time. The platform trial model, already proven successful in the cancer field, will greatly accelerate therapy development by allowing investigators to test more drugs, increase patient access to trials, and reduce the cost by quickly and efficiently evaluating the effectiveness of multiple therapies. New treatments are added to the platform trial as they become available, thereby decreasing the gap in time from identification of an exciting therapy to testing. Shared infrastructure, common data and sample collection processes, and central governance within the Platform trial will lead to operational efficiencies and time and cost savings.In our region, M Health Fairview, Mayo Clinic and Essentia Health have been named HEALEY ALS Platform Trial sites.
 
Natural History Pilot Project
The variability of ALS makes it difficult to predict how patients will progress and which outcome measures to use in clinical trials to track progression as well as determine effects of drugs being tested. This project is a natural history study out of the University of Minnesota that studies patients over time where clinical outcome and other measures are collected. The project will extend an ongoing natural history study which is collecting information on clinical symptoms, genetics, imaging, demographics, medical history, etc. The unique aspect of this study is that all of the natural history data (repository) will be made publically available and will be open-access for the whole research community.