What is TREAT-NMD?

The TREAT-NMD Alliance is a unique infrastructure focused on accelerating preclinical and clinical development across the neuromuscular field to improve patient treatment and care on an international scale. The Alliance was born from the EU FP6 funded TREAT-NMD neuromuscular network (2007-2011). From 2012 the Alliance has expanded its formal collaboration to engage in additional strategic partnerships with universities, patient organisations and pharmaceutical companies across the world. They key opinion leaders in neuromuscular disease are part of the alliance and we are able to offer our services and expertise to the pharmaceutical and biotech industry to bring promising new therapies into clinical trials.
All neuromuscular disorders are comparatively rare, and this creates a specific set of barriers to moving into a clinical trial. To ensure patient recruitment criteria are met, trials often have to be multinational, multicentre studies. The time taken to locate both the patient population and the specialist clinical centres with the expertise to run a trial can increase the costs of clinical studies significantly.
Through the TREAT-NMD infrastructure we can help industry and researchers identify the centres that have capacity and experience to conduct trials via the care and trial site registry (CTSR) and utilise our international patient registry platform to identify the patients to recruit into them, in accordance with study inclusion criteria.
In addition, TREAT-NMD can provide access to biobanks containing patient samples, provide advice on appropriate animal models, facilitate the selection of appropriate validated outcome measures and offer guidance on overall development programmes via TACT.