Preclinical Discovery and Development of Repurposed Drug Candidates for MND:
The majority of MND clinical trials, including trials using repurposed drugs fail due to lack of efficacy. As such there remains an urgent unmet need for safe and effective MND treatments.

Ensuring success in MND clinical trials needs to start with optimal preclinical decision-making, meaning the adoption of an enhanced, evidence-based approach to preclinical research so that only the most promising repurposed drug candidates are progressed into clinical studies.

Through LifeArc’s Translational Challenge in MND, this funding programme aims to boost drug repurposing in MND by investing at least £5 million in preclinical translation.

LifeArc will fund high quality innovative proposals that set out a rigorous evidence-based approach to the preclinical translation of repurposed drug candidates and drug candidate combinations, uniquely including funding for independent replication of project results through LifeArc. This will contribute to building a strong body of evidence to enable evidence-based decision making on which repurposed drugs should enter into biomarker guided clinical studies and clinical trial platforms for MND. This includes existing UK platforms: EXPErimental medicine Route to Success in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (EXPERTS-ALS), and MND systematic multi arm adaptive randomised trial (MND-SMART).