MND-SMART enrols 400th participant

Graphic of the United Kingdom with location pegs for the 17 sites now open and recruiting.

Oct 2022: Four hundred people living with MND have now joined MND-SMART.

We are delighted to announce that we have welcomed the 400th participant to MND-SMART. This is a major milestone for the study, which is now the biggest ever UK trial for people with MND. This achievement is down to many different people, but most notably those living with MND who give up their precious time to take part and contribute to continually evolving and improving our trial design.

The 400 participants have been recruited to the trial across 17 sites in the UK. This wouldn’t be possible without the dedication and strong collaborations between NHS care teams and research teams at our sites across Scotland, England and Wales, working with us here at the Euan MacDonald Centre, University of Edinburgh.

Our trial has pre-defined criteria about how many participants are needed before we can say definitively whether either of our first two drugs, memantine and trazodone, are effective in slowing down the progression of MND. Excitingly, reaching the milestone of 400 participants means that we are well on the way to this goal.

We know that everyone is keen to find out the results – we are too! We are reaching a crucial time point in the trial and although we understand the need for rapid answers, we need as many people as possible to continue taking their trial drugs for as long as they can. This is the only way we can generate definitive findings that will stand up to scrutiny, and help us answer crucial questions about whether drugs slow down the rate of progression of MND and prolong survival.

However, we’re most definitely on the journey, and we are excited to be firming up plans to add another drug into MND-SMART as well as opening more sites to make the trial accessible to more people.

Sincere thanks to everyone for getting us this far: people living with MND, their families, our generous funders including the Euan MacDonald Centre for MND Research, MND Scotland and the My Name'5 Doddie Foundation, and the myriad care and research staff here in Edinburgh and across the UK. Your support is invaluable.

Related links

MND-SMART website

The Euan MacDonald Centre for MND-Research

This article was published on: Monday, October 03, 2022
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