Professor Sarah Tabrizi was presented with the award for her contribution to Huntington’s disease (HD) research after giving the 2019 Yahr Award Lecture.
Her lecture highlighted news of a potential treatment for HD, presenting exciting data from the ground-breaking antisense oligonucleotude trials for HD as recently published in the NEJM. She also presented other novel ways of targeting the disease causing mutant HTT including post-transcriptional Huntingtin lowering approaches, such as RNA interference, antisense oligonucleotides, and small molecular splicing modulators; DNA targeting techniques, transcription activator-like effector nucleases, and CRISPR/Cas9.
The development of objective biomarkers of disease and HTT–lowering outcomes, as well as improving delivery and distribution of therapies, has brought them to the forefront of Huntington’s disease research, including clinical trials in patients.
Prof Alan Thompson, Dean of the Faculty of Brain Sciences at UCL, who also attended the event said: “It was wonderful to see Sarah receiving the highly prestigious Yahr award at the WCN in Dubai this week – and to listen to her superb lecture which really underlined how deserving the award - many congratulations!!
Further information:
Source: World Congress of Neurology
Image (left to right): Dr Steven L. Lewis, Professor Sarah Tabrizi, Dr Daniel Truong