Northwestern-to-Northwestern Swim

A Long Swim is a unique nonprofit that uses open water and marathon-distance swimming to raise funds for collaborative ALS research at the Ozdinler Lab at the Feinberg School of Medicine, part of Northwestern University.  

To date, A Long Swim has raised $2 million for that effort, and has been deeply gratified to see the pace of discovery to find a cure for ALS accelerate all the time.  It has been the collaboration that has made all the difference; as ALS research centers around the world work with one another and share ideas and information, the sun never sets on the progress to find a cure.  

Important connections that are often overlooked are the collaboration between the two campuses of Northwestern itself.  The undergraduate campus of the University, including the departments of the basic sciences, is located in Evanston, Illinois.  Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine is in downtown Chicago on the near north side.  The Ozdinler Lab at Feinberg collaborates closely with the Chemistry for Life Processes unit at the Evanston campus.  

That collaboration was catalyzed in part by donations from A Long Swim, and has yielded extraordinary results.  Specifically, the collaboration discovered a chemical compound that shows promise in halting, and in some cases, reversing, the degradation in upper motor neurons.  It is called NU-9, and it is now in the early stages of the FDA approval process.  Once it is approved, it will be a game-changer as a foundational building block to cure ALS.  

How do a bunch of swimmers celebrate such a successful collaboration?  They bring the two Northwestern campuses together; they swim from one to the other.