An MRI biomarker for disability progression for use in clinical trials

Project Summary:

Outcome measures to assess drug efficacy in progressive disease are a significant contributor to the rising and extraordinary cost of clinical trials.  The project aims to develop new MRI outcome measures that could result in more efficient preliminary assessment of drug efficacy, potentiallyresulting in smaller, shorter, less costly trials.

Large amounts of existing MRI and clinical follow-up data on patients with progressive MS will be collected from laboratories that have been in this field for many years and from large multicenter clinical trials that have been performed in the past. Advanced machine learning techniques, similar to those used for speech recognition, will be used to develop an MRI outcome measure that relates to and can predict clinical disability progression in far fewer subjects over shorter time.  Such an approach will make it possible to study larger numbers of drugs, and lessen the investment and time required to conduct clinical trials.