Dr Hannah Timmins has received a philanthropic grant from Hillcrest Foundation for her COMPASS Motor Neurone Disease project.

The grant was awarded for her project, ​“Compass: Comprehensive Multimodal Phenotyping to Advance Monitoring, Treating and Understanding of Motor Neurone Disease”. Dr Timmins’ project will focus on enhancing diagnosis and monitoring by integrating clinical, neurophysiological and imaging tools to provide comprehensive patient phenotyping.

​“The goal of the COMPASS project is to improve disease monitoring, refine treatment plans and inform clinical trials,” said Dr Timmins, who is a NeuRA Research Scientist and Conjoint Lecturer in the School of Clinical Medicine at UNSW Medicine and Health.

​“MND is a relentless and complex neurodegenerative disease. There is significant variability in symptom presentation, disease progression and response treatment, which impacts both clinical management and treatment development.

​“Despite advancements, accurately phenotyping MND patients remains difficult, resulting in delayed diagnoses, treatment and clinical trials enrolment.”

The 12-month project will combine clinical exams, functional scales, cognitive testing, and brain imaging, aiming to produce precise insights into MND progression.

​“The project seeks to contribute to comprehensive datasets from across our existing national networks that could support artificial intelligence (AI) models to predict patient outcomes, provide biomarkers to inform treatment development and offer precision medicine approaches,” Dr Timmins said.