ATLANTA, GEORGIA / ACCESS Newswire / March 11, 2025 / As Atlanta-based Hop On A Cure heads into its fourth year as a leading non-profit in ALS research, the foundation - started by John Driskell Hopkins (founding member of GRAMMY® Award-winning group Zac Brown Band) and his wife Jen, after John's own ALS diagnosis - has much to celebrate. As of February 2025, Hop On A Cure has given over $4 million in grants to research programs at notable hospitals across the country, including Houston Methodist Medical Center, Duke University Hospital, and Massachusetts General Hospital, as well as several university labs and independent programs, like ALS Therapy Development Institute, and ALS Cure Project.
Hop On A Cure logo in blue
"To witness the growth of Hop On A Cure and the continued giving from sponsors, donors, and friends, has been overwhelming," said Hopkins. "Every dollar brings us closer to a cure, and we're beyond thankful for the support we've been shown up to this point. It's not lost on me that we wouldn't be nearly as far in some of these studies and trials as we are because of the generosity of those who give. We could never fully express our gratitude."
Hop On A Cure kicked off 2024 with a $250,000 contribution to Project ALS. The funds have been divided between research initiatives for two new ALS drug candidates: Prosetin and the Paullones. Developed by Project ALS Therapeutics Core to treat all forms of ALS, Prosetin was engineered specifically to get into the brain and rescue ALS motor neurons. Hop On A Cure and Project ALS are partnering to mine additional patient data from the Phase 1 ALS trial of Prosetin (PRO-101) across Europe, Canada, and the United States. The paullones are a family of chemical compounds that leading researchers and doctors have wished to develop for ALS for over two decades. Having honed the paullones into soluble, orally available, brain penetrant compounds, Project ALS - along with Hop On A Cure - are supporting a pre-clinical push to optimize the top paullones performers and select a lead paullone compound to move forward toward ALS clinical trial.
The organization also donated $300,000 in grant funding to ALS Finding a Cure and their Organoid/Assembeloid studies. The goal of this partnership is to establish methodic consistency between studies, allowing for consistency between studies, allowing for comparison and collaboration, as well as drug screenings that could ultimately lead to new therapies - and a cure - for ALS. Congratulations to The labs working on these studies: Dr. Joao Pereira ( UAB), Dr. Andras Lakato Univ of Cambridge, UK), Drs. Jimena Andersen and Jie Jiang (Emory), Drs. Daryl Bosco (U Mass), Oscar Liang (Drexel University) and Dr. Kornelia Szebenyi (HUN-REN Research Center for Natural Sciences, Hungary).
2024 saw a second partnership with Massachusetts General Hospital - this time, Hop On A Cure donated $300,000 helping move forward the testing of a novel cell therapy for ALS in collaboration with the Massachusetts General Hospital's Vaccine and Immunotherapy Center and the Sean M. Healey and AMG Center for ALS. The study will involve the infusion of B cells from closely-matched donors into patients with ALS. Two patients have already received this treatment under the FDA's expanded access program. HOAC grant money supports the preparation for a complete Phase 1 clinical trial at Massachusetts General Hospital, including the regulatory application to the FDA.
In September, Hop On A Cure doubled down on its support of Duke University's Dr. Richard Bedlack. Previously awarded a $70,000 grant for his pilot trial to investigate the safety, tolerability, and preliminary efficacy of BL-001 probiotic in people with ALS, he was honored as the first recipient of Hop On A Cure's Accelerate a Miracle Project Award (AMP Award) during the organization's inaugural Harmony for Hope Gala. With that, an additional $50,000 was given to Dr. Bedlack and his team for their research.
The organization capped the year with a $300,000 grant donation to Packard Center, supporting four critical research initiatives in the fight against ALS: Case Western School of Medicine Assistant Professor Aaron Burberry's study of the microbiome; Barrow Neurological Institute's Dr. Rita Sattler's study of communication between neurons in the brain; University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine's Dr. James Shorter and his study in reversing the aggregation of TDP43; and Mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine instructor Jack Humphrey and his study to identify patient subsets and create a system to stratify data based on patients' genetic signatures. Hop On A Cure feels that the Packard Center's initiative to require collaboration between research entities is an important model that helps to advance the entire ALS scientific landscape.
Additionally, Hop On A Cure issued a $250,000 grant in December to The ALS Therapy Development Institute (ALS TDI) to support their work in identifying potential biomarkers of sporadic ALS by exploring Cryptic Exons. - It is a critical study, as roughly 85% of all ALS cases are sporadic, with no known history of the disease in the family.
Already in 2025, Hop On A Cure has signed off on a $330,000 grant to local partner Emory ALS Clinic (also based in Atlanta). Using a new methodology called NULISASeq, the funding will go toward analyzing blood samples from a large group of people, comparing those to the protein biomarkers specific to people with ALS in the hopes of providing essential information for the design and execution of clinical trials and more individualized care.
2025 has also seen a $100,000 grant to Dr. Feng Tian and his lab at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center/Harvard Medical School. Dr. Tian's lab is exploring combinations of drug treatments. He utilized multiple unbiased genomic approaches combined with an advanced deep learning-based drug target mining tool to find the optimal combination of drugs that maximize the neuroprotection in ALS treatment. In particular, Dr. Tian's lab has found that concurrent inhibition of two neurodegenerative pathways, namely integrated stress response and neuroinflammation, can achieve a high degree of neuroprotection.
"We continue to raise money for research because ALS isn't incurable - it's underfunded," said Hop On A Cure CEO Nic Shefrin. "This isn't an ‘if,' it's a ‘when,' and the more people who support our work and spread awareness about the importance, the quicker we'll get to the day that a major breakthrough is made and ALS is no longer considered terminal."
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SOURCE: Hop On A Cure
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