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Martin Turner is a Professor of Clinical Neurology & Neuroscience at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences at Oxford University. He is also a consultant neurologist at John Radcliffe Hospital, which is associated with the university. The focus of his research is biomarkers of disease activity in MND. Biomarkers are vital, because they allow researchers to tell whether a therapy trial is slowing disease progress. Q: Why are biomarkers so vital for MND research? At present we can only use very blunt biomarkers, like survival, to see if a drug’s working. We urgently need things we can measure, in blood or with some sort of scan, that shows how active the disease is. It means people with MND can take part in trials and find out relatively quickly whether the therapy is having any effect. It’s devastating to be involved in a 12 to 18-month trial, only to discover, at the end, that there’s been no benefit. Time is not on their side; while they’re tied up with a therapy, they’re not sure is working, they may miss an opportunity to join another trial. Q: What’s your focus for 2020? We want to make biomarker development part of the routine clinical environment. The first step is to roll out a three-monthly blood test for a marker called neurofilament, the levels of which reflect how active the process of neuronal loss is. Rolling that sort of test routinely into the clinic isn’t easy, however we have a roadmap of how to do it. It starts with getting the hospital laboratory on board, so that we can get samples into the freezer as soon as they’ve been taken. Then we set up a pipeline for testing the samples, followed by a way to feed those results back to patients when we see them every three months. Q: Why is international collaboration important for neurological research? International conferences are a way to meet colleagues and learn from them. In neuroscience, we’ve always had a tradition of collaboration. Being able to share ideas, divide the workload and avoid duplication means more work gets done. It's very stimulating intellectually, and it spurs you on. There’s a touch of competition in the air too, which is no bad thing. Q: If you could see into the future five years, what would you hope to find? I hope we’ll be able to give a diagnosis of MND followed by an offer of a drug trial to every patient, like we do now for cancer. I also hope that we’ll have one or two more licensed drug treatments, on top of riluzole. At the moment, there is no specific test and MND can be difficult to diagnose in the early stages. Practical care is still hugely important - it can add at least a year’s survival to patients on average, but I’d definitely like to be doing more in terms of drug therapy. Also, I think we will be routinely giving effective gene-based therapy for the 15% of MND patients with a genetic cause. Professor Martin Turner Oxford University Headlines 19 Hope is just around the corner