Alex Parker, PhD and members of his laboratory at the Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CHUM) Research Center have been awarded a three-year, $1.6 million grant from the Weston Family Foundation as part of its brain health research arm to investigate the role of a probiotic in the progression of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). ALS is a rare disease with no cure characterized by the selective loss of motor neurons, and the life expectancy on average is 3 to 5 years. Progressively, a person living with this disease loses the ability to walk, speak, eat, swallow, and, ultimately, to breathe.
 
The probiotic being used in the study is L. rhamnosus HA-114, provided by collaborators Lallemand Health Solutions.
 
“We have been collaborating with Alex Parker and his team for many years now and we are delighted to move forward with this new study which aims to document the health benefits of probiotics,” Sylvie Binda, vice president of research at Lallemand Health Solutions, said.
 
“Together we hope to learn how certain bacterial strains protect the nervous system from degeneration in ALS. These findings will help develop new therapeutic approaches,” Parker, who is a professor in the department of neurosciences at the University of Montréal, said.
 
Others involved in the research supported by this grant include: Dr. Geneviève Matte, director of the ALS clinic at the CHUM; Martine Tétreault, a fellow researcher at the CHUM Research Center;  and Stéphane Bronner, director of preclinical and clinical research at the Rosell Institute for the Microbiome and Probiotics and the research and development center of Lallemand Health Solutions based in Montreal; and researcher Matthieu Ruiz of the Montreal Heart Institute Research Center.
 
In Parker’s laboratory, research has demonstrated that the gut microbiota may be involved in the onset and progression of ALS. Therefore, they hypothesize, identifying neuroprotective bacterial strains could form the basis of new therapies. The strain which the research will focus on has been shown to protect motor neurons from degeneration in several animal models of ALS, namely in the worm C. elegans and in mice.
 
The next step in this research is to decipher the molecular mechanisms that explain this neuroprotective effect, and verify whether it is possible to observe the same therapeutic response in the participants of a clinical study which will begin at the CHUM in the spring of 2022.