Please Give Now to CPMC’s Forbes Norris ALS Center. More than one-third of the Center's budget is funded by philanthropy, enabling comprehensive, multidisciplinary care for patients and support services for their loved ones. Your generosity helps enable patients to access clinical trials and support services that insurance often does not cover.

CPMC Forbes Norris MDA/ALS Center

The Forbes Norris MDA/ALS Research & Treatment Center at Sutter Health’s CPMC has been at the forefront of national neuromuscular disease treatment and research for more than 40 years, combining clinical care, research and multifaceted resources for families affected by this devastating disease.

Sandy Morris, advocate for patient-centered clinical trial design

Sandy Morris says the integrated care she’s receiving at CPMC’s Forbes Norris Center is “amazing,” because everyone at the Center is willing to stay with patients for the whole course of the disease. Her goal for her ALS clinical trial work matches the goal of the Center itself, “to leave this disease better than she found it.”

“This disease is uniquely cruel,” says Sandy Morris, “because every month, or week, or day, you lose more functionality, and with the decreasing mobility and ability to communicate, you can feel increasingly isolated.” Since her diagnosis, Morris has been working with the organization I AM ALS to ensure that clinical trials for potential new ALS treatments are designed “with humans in mind.”

Because ALS patients generally survive for two to five years after diagnosis, Morris says, “We need to advance ALS science faster, and enroll clinical trial participants like wildfire.”

With Philanthropy, Promising New Developments

CPMC’s philanthropic partners have supported many of the activities of the Forbes Norris MDA/ALS Research and Treatment Center, bringing us hope that one day soon we will have new effective treatments to offer to our patients. Here’s just a few highlights of promising clinical trials the Center participated in:

• CPMC’s Forbes Norris MDA/ALS Center conducted a study that proved therapists can teach ALS patients to use their artificial speech generating devices via telemedicine technology. Prior to this, insurance would not cover the cost of the equipment without in-person training.
• A Phase 3 clinical trial involved a large number of patients to test the efficacy of Brainstorm’s NurOwn technique for harvesting stem cells from bone marrow.
• The Centaur AMX0035 trial that demonstrated encouraging results in slowing the rate of function loss.
• An early clinical trial of agents designed to block the effects of genetic mutations for the 10 to 20% of patients whose ALS is hereditary.
• CPMC’s Forbes Norris Center is the only Northern California site for a platform clinical trial, with three drugs (soon to be four) being tested simultaneously, potentially leading to accelerated drug development.