LifeArc has said it will commit £5m in grant funding to discover new treatments for motor neurone disease (MND) as part of a drug repurposing programme to combat high failure rates in clinical trials.
The programme aims to support the next generation of translational scientists and to give projects the best chance of success.
Affecting 330,000 people worldwide, MND is a neurological condition that progressively deteriorates the brain and nerves.
Currently, treatments for MND, including repurposed drugs, have been unsuccessful in showing beneficial effects in patients, and clinical trial failure rates for treatments remain high.
The new programme aims to fund pre-clinical research studies for repurposed drugs that show evidence of being effective for treating MND.
International research teams in academia, as well as small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), will be eligible to receive up to £750,000 in funding per project following the identification of a new repurposed drug with experimental evidence to treat MND.
The funding call aligns with LifeArc’s MND Translational Challenge to make the condition treatable by 2030 and will be underpinned by the Guiding principles for drug discovery and development in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis white paper, which has united researchers, clinicians, industry experts and people living with MND.
The funding forms part of the challenge’s £50m investment to accelerate the translation of scientific discoveries to improve the detection, treatment and management of MND.
The projects selected will benefit from LifeArc’s expertise, advice and mentorship in translational research, as well as its drug-repurposing knowledge and access to its collaborative network of project partners.
Additionally, a funding scheme to support data and artificial intelligence/machine-learning approaches to repurposed drug candidate identification in MND has been made available.
As part of this scheme, LifeArc intends to fund up to five bioinformatic projects that aim to use MND data sets, with up to £100,000 available per project over the next year.
Dr Paul Wright, head of LifeArc’s MND Translational Challenge, said: “Improving confidence in drug repurposing requires more robust preclinical research… We need to start with better decision-making at the pre-clinical stage to demonstrate as early as possible that a repurposed drug candidate has the potential to deliver improvements for patients.”