Dr. Teepu Siddique, an internationally recognized researcher, has received numerous awards for his work in neuromuscular disorders, especially amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig's disease.

He earned his medical degree in 1973 from the University of Karachi in Pakistan, Siddique and came to the United States in 1975 for an internship and a neurology residency at the New Jersey Medical School in Newark.

In 1981, as a junior faculty member at the University of Southern California medical school, Dr. Siddique decided to take on Lou Gherig’s disease. Dr. Siddique joined his colleagues in testing possible treatments for the disease, but he soon became frustrated. With no known causes, he was fighting a war against an elusive enemy. ALS affects up to 30,000 people in the United States; it renders the muscles of the body useless while leaving the mind unaffected. There is no effective treatment or cure for ALS.

ALS is inherited in 10 percent of cases and thus Dr. Siddique assumed there must be a gene responsible for the inheritance. In 1984, he transferred to Duke University Medical School, where he and his team embarked on a search for the culprit. They discovered a gene mutation is responsible for a rare, slowly progressive, early-onset form of the disease, called juvenile inherited ALS. The gene was found in highly inbred populations in North Africa and the Middle East. Dr. Siddique and colleagues discovered the gene in four Tunisian and Saudi Arabian families. Dr. Siddique expects to eventually find about a dozen genes that contribute in some way to ALS, and he hopes that subsequent discoveries will come more rapidly, given what he and his team already know.

Dr. Siddique’s awards include the 1994 Hope through Caring Award from the Les Turner ALS Foundation; the Forbes Norris Award from the International Alliance of ALS/Motor Neuron Disease Associations in 1995; the Sheila Essey Award for ALS Research from the American Academy of Neurology and ALS Association, which he received as a co-recipient in 1996; the Teacher Investigator Development Award from the National Institutes of Health in 1985; and the Third Annual Eleanor and Lou Gehrig Award from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1997. He is the author of more than 200 journal articles, abstracts and book chapters.