Remember the Ice Bucket Challenge craze?

The campaign that encouraged millions of people to dump buckets of ice-cold water over their heads raised enough money to help make an important research breakthrough, the international ALS Association has announced.

ALS causes nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord to gradually deteriorate. Within two to five years of diagnosis, most patients lose their ability to breathe, leading to their death.

$115 million were raised for the association, CNN reported. Some of that money went to Project MinE, a University of Massachusetts Medical School Project that was able to identify a gene that is responsible for the degenerative disease.

Read: Maltese breakthrough for motor neurone disease treatment

 
The gene, identified as NEK1, provides another potential target for therapy development, and brings scientists one step closer to treating the neurological disorder.

"The sophisticated gene analysis that led to this finding was only possible because of the large number of ALS samples available," said Dr. Lucie Bruijin, Chief Scientist at the ALS Association.

Just last week, researchers in Malta announced that they had discovered why ALS sufferers often have very low levels of survival motor neuron protein in their system. 

"The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge enabled The ALS Association to invest in Project MinE's work to create large biorepositories of ALS biosamples that are designed to allow exactly this kind of research and to produce exactly this kind of result," he told CNN.

This was the third ALS-related gene researchers discovered using money from the Ice Bucket Challenge.

"The discovery is unique in that the project that found the gene is led by someone who has ALS," CNN reported.