Recently, our Dad Tony Murland, was diagnosed with the rare fatal disease Motor Neurone Disease (MND). He started feeling weak back in August 2018 and after extensive tests over the last few months it has been confirmed that he has MND. This news came as a massive shock to our family, as you can imagine, however anyone who knows my Dad will know that he will not give in to this cruel disease without a fight. Sadly there is no cure for MND but there are treatments that you can undergo that will slow down the degeneration of the body. Sadly the only treatment you can receive on the NHS is a drug called Riluzole but this only prolongs survival by approximately 2-3 months. The good news is we have found a treatment at a clinic that works with stem cells that has been proven to increase the life expectancy by years. The bad news is that this treatment costs £34,000 and that is where we need your help.

The average life expectancy without treatment is 2 to 5 years.

What is MND?

Motor neurone disease (MND) describes a group of diseases that affect the nerves (motor neurones) in the brain and spinal cord that tell your muscles what to do. With MND, messages from these nerves gradually stop reaching the muscles, leading them to weaken, stiffen and waste.

MND can affect how you walk, talk, eat, drink and breathe. Some people also experience changes to their thinking and behaviour. However, MND affects everyone differently. Not all symptoms will affect everyone, or in the same order. Symptoms also progress at varying speeds, which makes the course of the disease difficult to predict.

MND is life-shortening and there is no cure. Although the disease will progress, symptoms can be managed to help achieve the best possible quality of life.

There is a 1 in 300 risk of getting MND across a lifetime. It can affect adults of any age, but is more likely to affect people over 50.

MND affects up to 5,000 adults in the UK at any one time. It is still not possible to give a clear answer about the causes of MND, as different things may trigger the disease for each individual.

More information about the treatment that Tony needs.

Stem cells are a special and particularly versatile type of cell found throughout the human body which grow and maintain our many different tissues and organs, and repair them when they're damaged. Since first being isolated in 1982, the standard therapeutic use of stem cells has been to transplant them into a patient’s body to replace damaged tissue, an approach that remains almost universally prevalent.

Numerous studies in the last ten years have shown that stem cells can do far more than simply substitute damaged cells – they also generate secretions, called extracellular vesicles (EVs), which play a critical regenerative role by activating local resident stem cell populations, revitalising blocked or dormant cells, minimizing cell death, and controlling inflammatory and abnormal immune responses.

EVs are separated from a patient’s own stem cells, harvested from a small sample of fat, and then multiplied in the laboratory. The EVs are then placed in normal saline for infusion back into the patient, delivering a cell-free therapy which is many times more effective than a standard stem cell transplant, and far safer as it avoids the risk of tumour formation or immunological issues.

The clinic that our Dad will go to, have spent over twenty years researching, developing and performing pre-clinical testing on this approach at UK government-regulated laboratories and now have more than seven years’ experience of advising and monitoring the successful clinical application of the therapy to patients suffering from a wide array of ailments – from muscular and skeletal injuries to cardiac damage and neurodegenerative diseases.