Creating a partnership which helps to accelerate the development of MND treatments.
Principal Investigators: Prof Ammar Al-Chalabi and Prof Chris McDermott
Lead Institution: King's College London and University of Sheffield
MND Association Funding: £1,000,000
Funding dates: August 2022 - January 2025
About the project
This collaborative partnership has been awarded to six UK universities to help accelerate the development of treatments for MND. This is helping to fund a 3-year project that aims to resolve two problems which are currently slowing progress in developing effective treatments for MND and will bring the research community together to discover new ways in which treatments can be found and tested. MND affects everyone differently and this means it is hard to measure disease progression and the effectiveness of potential treatments. The project aims to overcome this problem by improving ways that we can measure disease progression and treatment response. We also cannot take tissue samples from those with MND, and this makes testing new treatments on diseased cells very difficult. This problem will be addressed using blood cells from people with MND to generate motor neurons, and other types of brain cells, that are designed to behave in the same way as cells in someone with MND.
What could this mean for MND research?
This partnership will help to combat some of the barriers surrounding the drug discovery process and therefore accelerate the development of treatment for MND. It will also build a foundation for a UK MND research community, to increase collaborative working and pave the way for greater understanding of the disease, new potential treatments, and hopefully a cure for MND.
"We believe that by combining and coordinating our expertise, we will be more effective than if we work on projects in isolation. This partnership will provide the infrastructure to attract additional MND funding and enable further MND centres and researchers to join forces in the national effort to find effective treatments for MND. The partnership is the first step towards our goal to establish a national MND institute"
Prof Chris McDermott
Project code: 992-797