Les Turner Symposium on ALS

Keynote Presentation

Don Cleveland, PhD

Don Cleveland, PhD is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at UC San Diego. An internationally heralded expert in cancer biology, he earned a Ph.D in biochemistry from Princeton University. He has been elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. National Academy of Medicine. Cleveland purified and characterized the first microtubule associated protein – tau – which misassembles in Alzheimer’s disease and chronic brain injury. He uncovered mechanisms of motor neuron degeneration in ALS, demonstrating both neurofilament disorganization and toxicity of mutant superoxide dismutase. He showed that motor neuron death in inherited ALS is non-cell autonomous, requiring mutant damage to both neurons and neighboring glial cells. He developed “designer DNA drugs” (antisense oligonucleotides) for silencing disease-causing genes, with clinical trials now ongoing in ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s diseases.