BIO

Fernando Vieira is the CEO and Chief Scientific Officer at the ALS Therapy Development Institute (ALS TDI); a non-profit research institute dedicated to discovering and advancing effective treatments to slow, stop, or reverse amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).  At ALS TDI, he leads a multidisciplinary team of scientists and researchers in their efforts to discover and develop effective treatments and biomarkers for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). He has been focused on ALS research since 2001. His research findings – spanning basic discovery, preclinical drug discovery and optimization, clinical development, and translational ALS research have been widely cited. Specifically, his efforts have ranged from optimizing animal models for ALS preclinical pharmacology and drug screening to identifying and preclinically validating four drugs that have been advanced into human clinical assessment, and he has been awarded multiple patents for those drugs. His teams have contributed fundamental research findings to the study of genetic ALS, focusing on SOD1 mutation biology and C9orf72 mutation biology. His work has been published in prestigious journals including Nature Communications, Nature Genetics, Digital Medicine, and Science Translational Medicine. He leads the ALS Research Collaborative (ARC) Study, a groundbreaking distributed ALS natural history/omics study enrolling more than 1000 people with ALS. Through the ARC Study, he has led biomarker discovery efforts employing digital outcome measures and machine learning to assess ALS symptom severity. Dr. Vieira received his medical degree from Harvard Medical School and a bachelor’s degree in Biological Engineering from the University of Florida.