The European Medicines Agency (EMA) endorses TRICALS’ innovative platform trial

TRICALS has received the exciting news that the European Medicines Agency (EMA) endorses our plans for an innovative platform trial. Clinical trials investigating candidate medicines for ALS are costly, lengthy and often inaccessible for the majority of patients. This complicates and delays our search for effective treatments. By endorsing our state-of-the-art study protocol, the EMA allows us to radically improve current clinical trial design for ALS.

The key objectives of TRICALS are to accelerate the development of new treatments for ALS and to make clinical trials accessible for all patients. The support of the EMA for our platform trial design is therefore an important milestone. With our clinical platform trial, coined the ‘MAGNET’ study, we will be able to test multiple treatments simultaneously. Using computer models we can furthermore drastically increase the percentage of people with ALS that can participate in clinical trials (up to at least 75-85% of all patients).

Our proposal to use our time more efficiently during clinical trials has also been endorsed by the EMA. This means we will be quicker to start new clinical trials and to complete studies once we have acquired enough conclusive evidence about the efficacy of an experimental therapy. As a result, this will reduce the duration that patients are exposed to ineffective medicines. Importantly, we can get successful therapies to other patients more rapidly.

The positive review by the EMA opens the door to innovate and speed up clinical trials throughout our international network. The MAGNET study is now also likely to attract pharmaceutical interest from all over the world to initiate new clinical trials in Europe. Overall, the MAGNET study will prove an important landmark on our highway towards new therapies for ALS.