Global MND Research Roundtable

In August 2024, the inaugural Global MND Research Roundtable took place in Melbourne. Delegates explored major challenges facing MND research, including: 

• disease heterogeneity 
• understanding disease fundamentals 
• improving patient classification 
• developing biomarkers for diagnosis and disease tracking.  

These discussions laid the groundwork for the development of a shared global vision. The goal? To accelerate research through collaborative approaches.  

This session, held at the International Symposium on ALS/MND, shared the outcomes from the Melbourne meeting. It also shared the first draft of the Global MND Research Acceleration Strategy. Attendees were able to provide feedback on the strategy during the meeting.

Following extensive engagement and collaboration, FightMND, MND Australia and ALS Canada released the Global MND Research Acceleration Strategy. The strategy outlines seven shared global goals, including: 

1. centralisation of big data  
2. collaboration on biobanking  
3. global approaches to studying presymptomatic / asymptomatic patients  
4. recommendations of what is best practice in MND research  
5. decentralised human MND model core  
6. biomarker best practices for preclinical studies  
7. master protocol for clinical trials.  

The Strategy provides a coordinated roadmap that will help advance MND research worldwide through global collaboration. 

The 2025 Roundtable built on the success of the first event. Before the event, the Roundtable team talked to people in the global MND community. They wanted to understand where working together could make the biggest difference. Five priority areas stood out from these conversations. Each one has great potential to speed up progress toward the strategy’s seven global goals. 

The five priority areas were: 

• Biomarker validation. Identifying the biological signals that can reliably detect or track MND. 
• Understanding asymptomatic disease. Learning what happens in the body before symptoms appear. 
• Developing improved human-relevant models. Creating research tools that better reflect how the disease affects people. 
• Supporting research in under‑represented regions. Ensuring discoveries and benefits reach all parts of the world. 
• Strengthening pathways from preclinical work to clinical trials. Helping promising research move into human testing sooner. 

These areas represent some of the biggest challenges in MND research. Addressing them together is essential to speeding up the development of new treatments. 

In 2026, working groups are being formed across each priority area identified at the Roundtable. These groups bring together experts to continue the work started at the events. Their work drives global momentum and keeps collaboration alive in the MND research community.