They cause a range of increasingly disabling symptoms, leaving people unable to move, speak or swallow unaided. Most patients will die within about seven years. There is no cure, or any effective treatment.
For the past two years, the Pixel Fund has been helping us to fund a major research project into PSP and CBD. The PROSPECT study is a UK-wide study involving several hundred people with PSP and CBD. Its principal goals are to find ways of monitoring the progression of the disease in individual patients, and to identify ways of achieving earlier and more accurate diagnosis. This has the potential to revolutionise the design of clinical trials, by providing a more accurate way of assessing the effect of potential disease modifying drugs.
The study has so far produced a number of promising results, and has attracted a huge amount of international interest from other researchers and pharmaceutical companies. A major clinical trial is underway which is making use of the project’s infrastructure to recruit participants. We are now moving on to the second stage, known as PROSPECT-2, which will continue until 2022. This will carry out further in-depth tests on the existing cohort of patients, to monitor how the disease is progressing, as well as recruiting further participants who are at an earlier stage of the condition. The Pixel Fund has agreed to help us by providing further funding as we move into this new stage.