MAXOMOD

Motor neuron diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) are rare neurodegenerative diseases with poor prognosis and insufficient treatment options. Patients with ALS develop increasing muscle weakness as the disease progresses, ultimately leading to death when lung function is lost. Existing therapy options only treat the symptoms of the disease and can hardly influence the course of neurodegeneration. Therefore, there is a need for research to ensure that new therapies arrive in the treatment of motor neuron disease. The goal of the project is to develop new therapeutic strategies as well as biomarkers that enable early diagnosis of the disease. To this end, new molecular targets are to be identified that could serve as potential targets for drug therapies. Since RNA metabolism plays a crucial role in the pathogenesis of ALS, a protein-based approach will not be sufficient to comprehensively characterize disease-relevant pathways. We will thus combine multiple analytic methods from genomics, transcriptomics and microRNAomics up to proteomics, phosphoproteomics and metabolomics followed by multivariate semantic data integration to identify new disease-relevant pathways and biomarkers related to axono-synaptic pathology.