Our Story
The UK Motor Neuron Disease Research Institute is a national network of MND centres working together to understand how and why MND happens, what might work as a treatment, and to test possible treatments in clinical trials. Researchers across the country are carrying out world-leading MND research in a coordinated way to accelerate the search for a cure.
The UK MND RI started with patients. In 2021, people affected by MND launched the #United2EndMND campaign, frustrated at how slowly the research system was moving, and called on the UK government to commit £50 million in new funding to speed up the search for treatments. The campaign won that investment, and in 2022 it became the foundation for something that hadn’t existed before: researchers, clinicians, patients, charities and government working together in one coordinated partnership.
That first phase, then known as the MND Collaborative Partnership, set out to solve a specific problem: not a shortage of scientific talent, but fragmentation. MND research was spread across institutions with little shared data and no way for one centre’s progress to build on another’s. Over three years, the partnership built the infrastructure that coordinates research across the UK.
That partnership has since become the UK MND Research Institute, organised around the same goals it was founded to pursue: understanding how MND develops, developing treatments worthy of testing, and demonstrating, quickly and fairly, which of them work. What began as a campaign to make the system move faster is now the system moving faster.
How we are funded
The MND Collaborative Partnership, which ultimately became the institute, received funding from patient charities MND Association, My Name’5 Doddie Foundation and MND Scotland, medical research charity LifeArc, Medical Research Council and the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR).
Our Partners
Collaboration is central to the ethos of the institute.
We work with and collaborate with many partners, including Medicines Discovery Catapult, Health Data Research UK and Dementias Platform UK. We work with patient charities MND Association, My Name’5 Doddie Foundation and MND Scotland, medical research charity LifeArc, Medical Research Council and the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR), and these organisations were co-funders of the MND Collaborative Partnership, which has ultimately become the institute.
