Gala Dinner in Support of Motor Neurone Disease Research 2019 raises €30,000!

The Academic Unit of Neurology in Trinity College was delighted to hold a Gala Dinner in honour of Doddie Weir. We would like to thank all of those who made it a wonderful success. The event has raised over €30,000 all of which will go towards finding a cure for Motor Neurone Disease (MND), also known as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS).

Doddie Weir, in the face of adversity brought about by MND, decided to do everything in his power to make MND a curable disease. The charity My Name’5 Doddie Foundation is also focussed on designing better clinical trials and delivering better and more effective drugs.

The goal is to provide every person with MND with the opportunity to participate in high-quality clinical studies that will advance our knowledge of the disease and identify treatments that would save lives. To achieve this, each TRICALS Centre is committed to developing a sustainable clinical trials infrastructure within their own country that will enable parallel drug trials across countries participating in this ground-breaking initiative.

The first phase of this project will begin in late 2019, when we start a fast-track trial platform with two promising drugs ready to be repurposed for use in MND. These drugs are Triumeq (a drug for AIDS) and Lithium Carbonate (a drug for mood disorders). We expect that other drugs will be added into this platform as the studies evolve.

All drugs that we will test are already licensed for other indications and have excellent safety profiles. But because they are licensed, there is limited industry interest, and we must identify sources of funding outside industry. In Ireland, we estimate that it will cost at least €800,000 to ensure that Irish patients with MND can participate in the trials within the TRICALS platform in coming 12 months.

Funds raised will be equally shared by My Name’5 Doddie Foundation and the Irish MND Centre at Trinity College Dublin, with a track record of internationally acknowledged research.

Together we can make MND a treatable disease