May momentum

We’re very grateful to the 300 participants who’ve now signed up for the study. We wouldn’t have got to this stage without the tremendous generosity of all our participants, the guidance of our participant steering group, and the efforts of our research team both here at Queen Mary and across the UK. There is still a way to go before we’ll have enough data to draw high-quality conclusions about the genetics of MS across ancestries, but 300 is a fantastic start to what will be a long-term project.

Our network of co-investigators is growing by the week. We’re delighted to be linking up with the research teams in Cardiff, Manchester, Preston, Nottingham, and Birmingham. We’re also starting to work with the UK MS Register, a huge national effort led by the team at Swansea. The success of the project relies on collaborative science.

We had the opportunity to talk about our research to the Barts and Queen Mary International Clinical Trials Day research evening last week. This was a group effort - members of our steering group spoke about their motivations for taking part in the co-design of the study, and we spoke about the methods and scientific goals. A very warm reception and some great ideas from the audience about how to improve diversity in trials.

We also presented some of our baseline results and our methods at the Association of British Neurologists’ annual conference in Harrogate. You can take a look at this overview by clicking on this link. We’ll be presenting a more detailed version of this at the MS Society’s ‘MS Frontiers’ conference in July.

In other news we’re gearing up for the Queen Mary 'Festival of communities’ in a couple of weeks time. This event is all about sharing our research with people who live in the area and hearing what people think of it. Come alone on the Saturday to meet the team and chat about what we’re doing.

That’s all for now. For more updates remember to

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Thanks for reading

Ben & the research team