Mark Holmes is running the London Marathon for MND Research — and for his former football teammate Nick Varley.

Nick was offered a London Marathon place to raise money for Motor Neurone Disease research. And promptly found someone better qualified to do the running — his former Sevenoaks Town FC Vets teammate Mark Holmes.

Mark is running 26.2 miles in support of the Sheffield Institute for Translational Neuroscience (SITraN) — one of the most powerful MND research centres in the world. Led by Professor Dame Pamela Shaw, SITraN has grown from 64 researchers to over 300, and is now expanding with a new £24 million building that will double its research capacity.

Their work is already bearing fruit. SITraN led the UK arm of the tofersen trial — the first therapy ever to show measurable improvements in MND patients, now approved by the FDA and European Medicines Agency.

MND is a fatal, rapidly progressing disease with no cure. Every day in the UK, six people are diagnosed — and six more die from it. A third don’t survive beyond a year. The lifetime risk is 1 in 300.

But there is hope — and much of it is being found in Sheffield.

Every pound you donate funds researchers working to turn that hope into treatments, and ultimately a cure. The dream? That one day no-one will die of MND.

Nick can’t run the marathon. But together, we can make every one of Mark’s miles count.

Please donate whatever you can. It means more than words can say.