NeuRA researchers have been awarded several million dollars in grants from FightMND for projects to improve Motor Neurone Disease (MND) diagnosis and treatments.
Associate Professor Emma Devenney, Associate Professor Rachel Tan and Dr Hannah Timmins, all from NeuRA and UNSW Sydney, were awarded funds in FightMND’s 2026 grant round, under the “Diagnosing MND” stream.
It’s Assoc Prof Devenney’s first grant from FightMND, with $932,000 to support ‘The DIAMOND Sleep Study’. This project will examine if disturbed sleep patterns may be one of the earliest signs that a person is developing MND. Through monitoring sleep and brain patterns in people at risk of developing MND but not yet showing symptoms, it’s hoped this project may identify a new way to diagnose the disease as early as possible.
“We know that the disease processes of MND begin many years before symptoms appear and we can make a clinical diagnosis, so being able to identify changes to a patient’s neural network at an early stage could allow us to make much earlier diagnoses and interventions,” Assoc Prof Devenney said.
“Sleep provides a unique window into brain function, so we want to investigate whether measuring sleep disruption could act as a biomarker for pre symptomatic disease if we combine it with neuroimaging, blood biomarkers and clinical assessment.
“We hope that this research won’t just allow us to use sleep disruption as an early indicator of MND, but also whether improving the patient’s sleep might actually change the course of their disease.”
Assoc Prof Tan, who will join NeuRA in the new year, received a $999,981 grant to investigate the toxic TDP-43 protein and see if it can be detected in the blood. It’s hoped this project, ‘Mapping protein biomarker signatures of progressive TDP-43 mislocalisation across the sporadic MND brain’, may identify early signs of MND in the brain through blood testing, reducing diagnostic delay and improving targeted treatments.
“FightMND’s grant will fund our project team to map protein biomarkers across the brain in patients with sporadic ALS,” Assoc Prof Tan said.
“We want to identify novel molecular signatures of disease pathogenesis with the goal of improving diagnosis and advancing therapeutic discovery for patients with sporadic ALS.”
Dr Timmins received a grant of $299,991 to harness advances in AI capabilities to analyse thousands of patient records, blood tests, brain scans and nerve tests to find patterns of disease doctors could not otherwise detect. Dr Timmins hopes results of her PRECISION-MND project will improve diagnostic delay and improve clinical trial recruitment.
“By combining clinical information with novel brain imaging, nerve tests and blood biomarkers, PRECISION-MND will use artificial intelligence to help identify MND earlier and better understand how the disease differs from person to person,” Dr Timmins said.
“Our goal is to translate these insights into tools that support more accurate diagnosis, improve access to clinical trials and enable more targeted studies, accelerating the path towards effective treatments.”
Honorary NeuRA researcher, Dr Sicong Tu from the University of Sydney, also received funding from FightMND with an ‘Infrastructure and Collaboration’ grant for the National MND Data Nexus.
This $1.45 million project aims to establish a network of MND clinics across Australia, including at NeuRA, and equip them with advanced imaging and neurophysiological biomarkers. The MND clinics will have tools to perform brain scans and measure how well the nervous system is working. The data obtained will create a digital MND biorepository that clinicians will use to detect MND, track disease progression, and improve patient care. The biorepository will also be used to develop more accurate ways to detect MND and validate the effectiveness of medicines tested in clinical trials for MND.
