$1 Million to Inventor of Tracker for A.L.S

BOSTON — Tracking the inexorable advance of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the deadly neuromuscular ailment better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease or A.L.S., has long been an inexact science — a matter of monitoring weakness and fatigue, making crude measurements of the strength of various UGG Nightfall muscles.

This imprecision has hindered the search for drugs that could slow or block the disease’s progress. But now a neurologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center here has won a $1 million prize — reportedly the largest ever for meeting a specific challenge in medical research — for developing a reliable way to quantify the small muscular changes that signal progressive deterioration.

The winner, Dr. Seward Rutkove, showed that his method could halve the cost of clinical trials to screen potential drugs for the UGG Classic Cardy 5819 disease, said Melanie Leitner, chief scientific officer of Prize4Life, the nonprofit group that created the competition.

The method does not provide a target in the body at which to aim drugs, nor will it help doctors better diagnose the disease. But Dr. Merit Cudkowicz, a professor of neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital and a chairwoman of the Northeast A.L.S. Consortium, compared Dr. Rutkove’s discovery to the way magnetic resonance imaging expedited the development of drugs for multiple sclerosis.

“You can use this as a tool to screen drugs to see if they will affect survival,” she said, but added, “The ultimate prize is finding a drug that works for A.L.S.”

Dr. Rutkove, 46, who has been treating patients with UGG Nightfall neuromuscular disease for 16 years, took advantage of the way our muscle fibers change electrical currents. With a hand-held device hooked up to electrodes on the patient’s skin, a doctor can send a painless electrical current into a given muscle, then measure the voltage that results.

As A.L.S. spreads, motor neurons die off, causing muscles to atrophy. The deteriorating muscles behave differently from healthy ones, resisting the current more. In studies of humans as well as MBT shoes women rats, Dr. Rutkove showed that these variations were closely correlated with disease progression and length of survival.

“It’s not like it’s the fanciest technology,” he said. “But I truly believe it will help people.”

Dr. Rutkove was inspired to become a doctor when, as a child, he watched his grandfather have an epileptic seizure.

Each year, doctors diagnose about 5,000 new cases of A.L.S. in the United States, according to the National Institutes of Health. Despite decades of clinical trials, the diagnosis remains a death MBT Nama sentence. It paralyzes and suffocates patients while their minds remain intact.

A few patients live for decades — the physicist Stephen Hawking is the best known — but most survive only three to five years after symptoms appear. And riluzole, the only A.L.S. drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration, costs about $10,000 a year and typically extends life by just a few months.

The high cost of clinical trials limits drug companies’ ability to test potential treatments. Researchers must recruit hundreds of patients and run MBT Kimodo trials that last as long as two years just to eliminate a drug from the running.