The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge Actually Worked; $100 Million In Donations Leads To Breakthrough

Remember the ALS Ice Bucket challenge? Of course you do, it was everywhere.

There’s even a chance you’re still pulling ice-chunks out of your hair. (Okay, that’s very unlikely, but you get the mental portrait we’re trying to paint here.)

Turns out the viral campaign to raise awareness of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (more popularly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease) worked gangbusters, and not just because everyone now knows what ALS stands for now.

According to Vice, the $100 million raised by the campaign actually led to some scientific breakthroughs to help understand and hopefully treat ALS in the very near future.

Johns Hopkins medical researcher Jonathan Ling took to Reddit over the weekend to discuss the recent findings, just published in Science Magazine.

Ling said the new information that had been uncovered through the Ice Bucket-funded research could lead to clinical trials of a new treatment technique in just two or three years’ time.

They discovered that ALS is caused by a defective protein in the nucleus of cells; however, current mouse stem cell experiments revealed that previously damaged and dying cells could come “back to life.”

"With the amount of money that the ice bucket challenge raised, I feel that there's a lot of hope and optimism now for real, meaningful therapies."

Who says hashtag activism can’t help?