Yes We Khan
Yes We Khan - Find a Cure
Fundraising for My Name'5 Doddie Foundation
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Thank you so much for visiting our fundraising page for the My Name'5 Doddie Foundation!
We are Yes We Khan, a team of 2 Scots and a Canuck that will be participating in the Mongol Rally 2022.
Motor Neurone Disease (MND or ALS in Canada) is a fatal, incurable disease that has a 1 in 300 risk of people having a form of MND in one's lifetime.
The 2 Scots, Chris and Marc, unfortunately lost their Grandmother to MND during their childhood. This is why we are driving 10,000 miles from Orkney, Scotland to Georgia, with pit stops planned in both the Arctic Circle & the Sahara Desert in 4 weeks in a car your gran would drive. All of this is aid to raise awareness and funds to aid those impacted by MND in the present and future and ultimately work together to bring us closer to a cure.
We believe that Yes We Khan Find a Cure for MND.
A Note from The My Name'5 Doddie Foundation on where your money will be going:
"We are committed to funding research that will lead to meaningful treatments for MND, and this involves funding the most basic research in a lab to understand the origins of disease, right through to large-scale clinical trials. Please see below some examples of the research we are currently funding - I would be very happy to send further information if it would be helpful.
- MND-SMART - the UK's first platform trial in MND. A platform trial is designed to test more than one drug at the same time, which is a much more efficient way of testing drugs than more 'conventional' clinical trials which typically test one drug vs a placebo and can take several years to complete. The trial has been running since 2020 and has recruited over 300 patients from 17 sites across the UK - many of these sites had never run MND clinical trials before so our investment is providing key opportunities for people with MND to take part in research. Find out more about MND-SMART here: https://www.mnd-smart.org/
- MAGNET - another platform trial running across Europe and Australia - this trial is currently testing one drug, but more will be added at a later date. This trial is investigating a drug in people with MND who have a specific variant of a gene. If successful, this drug would be a 'personalised' treatment for people with this variant.
- Repurposed drugs - we are funding several lab projects and clinical trials (including both MND-SMART and MAGNET) that are investigating drugs for MND that are already licensed for use in other diseases. The advantage of repurposed drugs is that, if they are found to be beneficial in MND, the time it takes to approve them will be significantly less than if it were a completely new drug, because there is already a wealth of safety data available. For a disease like MND, which typically progresses quickly, this could be of huge benefit.
- Biomarkers - a key hurdle to the progress of MND clinical trials has been the lack of reliable biomarkers (something that can be measured in the body e.g., blood cells, chemicals, heart rate, etc.) to objectively measure the progress of disease, and therefore whether a drug is having an effect. Several of our projects are investigating biomarkers in the blood that could help us measure disease more accurately so we can more easily interpret data from clinical trials. This may also help us to diagnose MND quicker so that patients can start treatment earlier.
Presently, we are embarking on an exercise to determine the priorities of the MND community, specifically related to research. We will bring together people with MND, their carers, researchers, regulatory authorities and industry professionals to identify and prioritise their top unanswered questions that they agree are the most important. The priorities will feature in our comprehensive research strategy, to be published in 2022, and will clearly set out the steps we will take in the coming years, to make finding meaningful treatments for MND, and ultimately a cure for MND, a reality."