Funding for two MS research centres renewed
Our Centres of Excellence in Edinburgh and Cambridge have received new funding to continue their work to find treatments for everyone living with MS.
We’re proud to announce that we’ve committed to fund the Centres of Excellence in Edinburgh and Cambridge for a further five years. Each Centre will receive almost £2 million to continue their groundbreaking research.
They aim to develop treatments for the tens of thousands of people in the UK living with progressive MS, who currently have nothing to stop their disability getting worse.
They do this by bringing together world-leading researchers, supporting early career researchers to become future leaders, and exploring questions vital for finding treatments for everyone with MS from different angles.
Finding ways to repair damaged myelin
We first funded the Cambridge Centre for Myelin Repair in 2005. Since then, scientists at the Centre have carried out research that aims to translate laboratory discoveries into new treatments that repair damage to myelin – the protective coating that surrounds our nerve fibres.
Their work has already dramatically increased our understanding of myelin repair. For example, researchers at the Cambridge Centre were the first to identify that the diabetes drug metformin could improve myelin repair in rats. And their CCMR2 trial went on to show that a combination of metformin and clemastine can boost myelin repair in people with relapsing MS.
Over the next five years, Professors Thora Karadottir, Stefano Pluchino and Alasdair Coles and their team will build on this progress.
We are excited to build on the Cambridge Centre’s strong foundations in finding new treatments for people with MS with this funding renewal.
With groundbreaking work in the lab all the way to testing promising treatments in trials, we are set to continue making discoveries that will benefit people living with MS worldwide – including the myelin repair therapies that we still so desperately need.
Protecting nerves from damage
We’ve funded the Edinburgh Centre for MS Research since 2007. In that time, it has grown into a world-leading hub for MS research.
Recent research from the Centre shows that nerve damage can start very soon after the protective myelin coating around nerves is injured. This means we don’t just need to stop the immune attacks responsible for this damage. We need to protect the nerves themselves and find ways to repair myelin, even in the earliest stages of MS.
In this new grant, Professors Anna Williams and David Lyons and their team aim to understand and test how we might prevent this early damage, and develop more personalised ways to treat MS. The Edinburgh Centre brings together the right researchers and the right tools to do this.
We’re proud to do world-leading research into MS at the University of Edinburgh Centre of Excellence with the help of MS Society funding for nearly 20 years now. This new funding will help us continue our groundbreaking research into nerve damage in MS – allowing us to measure changes, find new targets for treatments, and test out the most promising in the lab. In the long run, we hope this work will contribute to our shared goal of finding treatments to slow or stop MS for everyone.
Keeping up momentum
We’re incredibly proud of what the Centres have achieved so far. But we can’t lose momentum now.
Over 150,000 people live with MS in the UK, and our Centres are key to building a growing, skilled and diverse research workforce who can produce tomorrow’s breakthroughs.
The research at the Centres of Excellence in Cambridge and Edinburgh is cutting-edge. And will play a crucial role in helping us reach a future where nobody needs to worry about their MS getting worse.
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