First MND participants enrolled on MAGNET clinical trial from TRICALS

An international clinical trial part-funded by My Name’5 Doddie Foundation has just started recruiting its first participants. MAGNET (Multi-arm, Adaptive, Group-sequential trial NETwork) is an innovative clinical trial which will investigate multiple treatments for MND at the same time. It has been launched by TRICALS (Treatment Research Initiative to Cure ALS), an independent consortium of leading MND experts, patient organisations and fundraisers, all with the same goal: to find effective treatments for MND.

MAGNET is a platform trial, meaning it has several advantages over more traditional clinical trials. It is designed to be adaptive, so new drugs can be added once the trial has started, and drugs can be taken away if they are found not to be effective. In addition, participants are more likely to receive a trial drug than a placebo (dummy drug), and, for those who are receiving placebo, the time will be kept as short as possible.

What’s more, the MAGNET trial uses an innovative computer model that considers several clinical variables such as disease duration and lung function, to determine whether a person with MND is eligible to take part. The model, that was endorsed by the European Medicines Agency in 2020, can increase the number of eligible participants up to five-fold. All these aspects of trial design bring the TRICALS consortium a step closer to their goal of every person with MND being able to take part in a clinical trial.

At present, the trial is testing one drug, lithium carbonate, but others are to be added in the future. The drug will be tested in people with MND who have a particular mutation in the UNC13A gene. Several studies have shown these individuals may have a better response to lithium carbonate than individuals without the genetic variant. It is hoped that by targeting a specific subtype of disease, any potential effect of the drug will be more apparent than if targeting the population as a whole.

Lithium carbonate is already used for treating several mood disorders. A benefit of trialling a drug that is already being used to treat other diseases is that if it’s found to be effective in MND, it will take less time to approve for MND compared to a completely new drug.

My Name’5 Doddie Foundation has supported the set-up of the MAGNET trial in the UK. Professor Ammar Al-Chalabi, TRICALS executive board member and Professor of Neurology and Complex Disease Genetics at King’s College London, said, “The MAGNET trial will be shortly starting in the UK, something that is only possible because of the support of the My Name’5 Doddie Foundation and its donors. We are very grateful to be able to run this international study at several sites across the country.”

In total, sites from 7 countries will be recruiting to the MAGNET trial: 6 in Europe and 1 in Australia. The intention is to recruit 171 patients in the first treatment arm. My Name’5 Doddie Foundation is proud to join a collaboration that will unite expertise and resources from across the world, to progress the MND research landscape.

In addition to My Name’5 Doddie Foundation, MAGNET is receiving support from MND Association (UK), Alan Davidson Foundation (UK), Dutch ALS Foundation (Netherlands), FWO with support of ALS Liga (Belgium), Ulla-Carin Lindquist stiftelse för ALS-forskning (Sweden), Thierry Latran Foundation (France), Fundación Luzón (Spain) and FightMND (Australia).

Find out more about TRICALS here.