Professor Justin Yerbury - a UOW Big Ideas Festival speaker.

‘An Infectious Idea: How protein folding drives MND progression’
Professor Justin Yerbury and his team are changing the way scientists understand disease progression and their work has contributed to a paradigm shift in the understanding of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), the most common type of motor neurone disease (MND), and for which there are no current effective therapies. Professor Yerbury’s team hopes to change that and the impact of the work he and his team have done is being felt globally, across several fields, and is feeding the development of therapeutic strategies by industry. The Wollongong based team has made a number of significant discoveries and have helped pioneered a new field that has shown that misfolded and aggregated protein can be propagated cell to cell, possibly explaining the focal onset and regional spread of symptoms in MND.
For information: www.uow.edu.au...