Multiple sclerosis research is to be boosted by new funding for a research hub dedicated to tackling the disease. The MS Society have donated £1.85m to the University of Edinburgh to fund an MS Research Centre of Excellence. The Centre will be co-led by Professor Anna Williams at CRM and will support attempts to develop life-changing treatments for multiple sclerosis and provide training for the next generation of research scientists. Research will focus on three areas: understanding more about neurodegeneration in progressive MS; creating a drug discovery pipeline involving tests to screen drugs that may prevent neurodegeneration; and improving the ways we can use brain imaging in people with MS, to measure neurodegeneration and test the effectiveness of drugs in clinical trials. It is very exciting to have the MS society UK Edinburgh Research Centre here at the University of Edinburgh co-directed by Profs Siddharthan Chandran, David Lyons, Adam Waldman and myself. We have three parts to our project plan – first to understand more about neurodegeneration in progressive MS, second to screen drugs to prevent neurodegeneration in a drug discovery pipeline and third to find better imaging measures of neurodegeneration in people with MS, so that it will be easier to see if these drugs work. We are looking forward to working with the MS Society UK and their other centre at the University of Cambridge to get treatments to people with progressive MS. Professor Anna WilliamsPersonal Chair of Regenerative Neurology, CRM This article was published on 2024-08-22
