Since 1987, Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) has been home to The Eleanor and Lou Gehrig ALS Center (ALS Center). The ALS Center team strives to provide comprehensive care, support services, and access to clinical research for ALS patients. This challenge grant supports the ALS Center in its fundraising efforts to treat more patients and do more research with its own patients while strengthening and shortening the path from research to personal treatment.

Since 1987, Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) has been home to The Eleanor and Lou Gehrig ALS Center (ALS Center). The ALS Center team strives to provide comprehensive care, support services, and access to clinical research for ALS patients. This funding will expand the ALS Center’s capacity for cutting-edge research by recruiting a leading scientist to join the ALS Center and Motor Neuron Center. This new member of the faculty will leverage Columbia’s strengths in Precision Medicine to undertake pivotal research that utilizes genomics and bioinformatics to further understand the role of cell-to-cell interactions in the pathophysiology of ALS and related disorders of the central nervous system. This comprehensive research program will benefit the entire neurodegenerative disease research community. Columbia’s recruited scientist for this position is Hemali Phatnani, PHD, who is and will continue to also serve as the head of ALS research at fellow Tow grantee New York Genome Center.