31 January 2025 News
An innovative, experimental medicine programme, designed to identify potential treatments for MND more quickly has launched at six centres, with a further five due to open during this year.
The EXPERTS-ALS platform will enable researchers to more rapidly screen potential drugs in people with motor neurone disease (MND).
People with MND recruited to the trial will be allocated to one of three drugs currently being tested - Metformin, Nifedipine and Ropinirole. The first participant was recruited in November 2024.
“We are delighted this programme is now open to eligible participants. EXPERTS-ALS was made possible by our United to End MND campaign, which secured the core £8m funding commitment from the Government, and from ongoing collaboration through the UK MND Research Institute.
“This exciting and novel experimental medicine platform should help the research community better identify and prioritise drugs to be fast-tracked into clinical trials. By extension, this increases our chances of ‘picking winners’ that will have a genuine therapeutic impact for people living with this devastating disease.”
Currently, drugs are put forward for clinical trials based on research done in the laboratory and have not been tested in people living with MND. This is part of the reason for the low success rate of clinical trials in MND to date. However, the EXPERTS-ALS platform will screen drugs in eligible people living with MND, looking for early signals of benefit.
A ‘go’ or ‘no-go’ decision can be reached within just a few months and the most promising drugs prioritised for testing in larger phase 3 clinical trials faster and with a higher chance of a positive outcome.
One of the signs being used in the study to tell if a drug is promising is a biological marker of disease activity called neurofilament light chain (NfL), which was confirmed as a biomarker of disease through Association funded Project AmBroSia. The levels of this marker are measured using blood tests at regular points throughout the study. If the levels of NfL are found to fall significantly in the majority of people taking the drug (ie potentially slowing disease activity) that drug will be prioritised for larger phase 3 trial platforms such as MND-SMART, to fully test its potential as a treatment.
The programme is funded by £8 million from the Government as a part of the £50 million pledge resulting from the #United2EndMND campaign, with the MND Association together with LifeArc and My Name‘5 Doddie Foundation contributing additional funding to extend the length of the trial platform.
It is a flagship project of the UK MND Research Institute (UK MNDRI), led by Professor Martin Turner at the University of Oxford and UK MND RI co-director Professor Chris McDermott at the University of Sheffield.
To learn more about signing up to this platform trial please see the EXPERTS-ALS website.
Read more on our EXPERTS-ALS webpage and in our research blog.