Accelerated Cure Project Announces Collaboration with EMD Serono to Advance Patient-Focused Drug Development in Multiple Sclerosis

WALTHAM, Mass., Oct. 2, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — Accelerated Cure Project (ACP) for Multiple Sclerosis (MS) today announced it has entered into a ground-breaking collaboration with EMD Serono, the biopharmaceutical business of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany in the U.S. and Canada, to capture and integrate the perspectives of people affected by MS into the design and implementation of clinical trials in MS. The patient-focused drug development collaboration will be supported through iConquerMS™ (www.iConquerMS.org), a research initiative of the Accelerated Cure Project, and will inform EMD Serono’s MS clinical trial program. The collaboration includes the development and validation of patient-reported outcomes (PROs) in drug development.

The program aligns with Patient-Focused Drug Development (PFDD) guidance from the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA), which defines PFDD as a systematic approach to ensure that patients’ experiences, perspectives, needs and priorities are captured and meaningfully incorporated into drug development and evaluation. The collaboration will convene team members from EMD Serono and from the iConquerMS people-powered research network to collaborate on the design and endpoints of clinical trials, defining measures and meaningfulness of treatment benefit for people living with MS. Additionally, iConquerMS participants will provide input across all stages of the study through workshops, document reviews, focus groups and surveys. The iConquerMS patient portal will also be used to gather new data on the final MS patient-reported outcome measures from hundreds of people living with MS.

“Those of us living with multiple sclerosis have the most valuable understanding of what matters most when it comes to treatment of this condition,” said Laura Kolaczkowski, Lead Patient Representative and Co-Principal Investigator of iConquerMS. “The collaboration between the iConquerMS initiative and EMD Serono is an important opportunity for our collective voices and insights to be heard and to drive real progress in research, drug development, and ultimately in the fight against MS.”

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