Amantadine to be removed from the MND-SMART trial

Today it has been announced that the treatment amantadine will be removed from the MND-SMART trial, because the interim analysis results show that this treatment has not demonstrated a benefit in slowing MND progression. 

MND-SMART is the largest MND clinical trial in the UK. The trial is designed to test multiple drugs in parallel so that researchers can get definitive answers about the efficacy of new treatments rapidly. Drugs that are found to be ineffective can be removed from the trial and new drugs can be added once the trial is already running. 

We are one of the partners who have previously funded MND-SMART, alongside the Euan MacDonald Centre for MND Research, MND Scotland, MND Association, the Alan Davidson Foundation and Baillie Gifford. 

Whilst the removal of amantadine will be disappointing news for the MND community, reaching this definitive result allows MND-SMART to move on to test other treatments. Without high quality research like this we are unable to rule out drugs that don’t work or find new drugs that do work. 

MND-SMART are currently recruiting participants for tacrolimus, which we told you about earlier this year and they have plans to start testing another treatment later in 2026. 

For further information about this latest update, please visit the  MND-SMART website here  or, if you are enrolled on the trial, please speak to your site team.