The Background - The 42 trial participants were willing to submit to ground-breaking clinical trials in from 2013 - 2017 involving invasive brain surgery and infusions of a specific neurotrophic factor, GDNF; an amazing and inspirational experience highlighted in the double award-winning BBC documentary “The Parkinson’s Drug Trial – A Miracle Cure?”. Since then they have sought to put the spotlight on their belief that the treatment worked. To that end the GDNF Participant group, which represents a large number of the brave volunteers, wish to unite with Parkinson’s charities and other organisations to help realise the potential of neurotrophic factors to unlock Parkinson’s.

The Aims - The Challenge will bring people and organisations together, to raise awareness of and urgency for the need for a cure and put people affected by Parkinson’s truly at the centre of trial design. The Challenge will also raise funds to progress research and trials into the beneficial effects of neurotrophic factors, increasingly seen by science as having the potential for a cure.

Not all of those who took part in the trial are physically up to taking on 100 miles via any form of exercise, and for each of them, we are trying to find GDNF supporters who will complete the challenge on their behalf. I'm honoured to be doing my own effort on behalf of Ron Johnson, who, if you've seen the BBC documentary, just wanted to play football with his grandkids. 

**UPDATED** The Dates - The challenge was originally planned to take place on 1-10 April 2021, in the run-up to World Parkinson’s Day on 11 April 2021. Due to Covid restrictions impacting the intended challenges for some of the teams, the new dates are: From 1st to 14th September

My personal challenge as a part of this group effort, will be to run, walk, crawl, swim or cycle 100 miles over ten of the first 13 days, with an extra challenge on the last day to cover 100 miles in that day alone. 

With some great support, I managed this on the original intended dates, and will now do it all again in September - oh joy! It seems only right that given the extra time I have to raise funds for this potentially disease modifying therapy, I need to increase my target accordingly

If you'd like to see the life changing benefits of GDNF, take a look at these two contrasting videos - in the one, you can see Darren doing a sit/stand test after receiving infusions of GDNF taken from the BBC documentary covering the GDNF trial, and in the other, you can see my attempt to reproduce his self experiment on World Parkinson's Day 2020: 

Darren sit/stand test: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p072vjll

Andy on World Parkinson’s Day:

https://www.facebook.com/779022159/videos/10158485860602160/