Good news: after months of dabbling in lay science in my spare time and on this blog, I have finally left my job in consulting and landed a job as a legit scientist in a neurobiology lab, working primarily on Huntington’s disease (HD).  As a genetic neurodegenerative protein-folding disease, it’s got a lot in common with Fatal Familial Insomnia, so my hope is that I’ll be learning a lot of relevant biology and skills as I go.  Toward that end, I expect to be blogging about a lot of what I learn here at cureffi.org.  Expect to see a lot of posts about gene therapy, computational methods, stem cells, and a host of other topics relevant to both diseases.

It’s inspiring to be working on HD, both as an opportunity to learn and as an opportunity to contribute to solving this disease.  And as I learned this morning at the Hereditary Disease Foundation’s HD2010 conference, there is quite a large community of people worldwide, and especially in Boston, working on HD.  It is a rather well-organized and well-funded endeavor and, beyond the science itself, may hold a lot of lessons for prion disease research in the organizational realm as well.