Thank you for taking the time to visit our fundraising page. 

If you have MS or know someone with MS this campaign and study will be relevant to you. It is clear that some of the disease-modifying treatments we use to manage MS blunt the immune response to coronavirus and hence may prevent a coronavirus vaccine from being effective.

Thanks to a generous grant from the Barts Charity we have been able to develop an ultrasensitive GloBody coronavirus antibody assay that will allow us to test whether or not you have been infected with the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. The difference to other assays is that we can use a simple blood spot for this assay. The advantage of using a blood spot is that we can to a study quickly and remotely using the post to collect blood specimens.

To complete an initial study on 3,000 people with MS we need about £25,000 to cover the costs of collecting, processing and running the assay. The data from this study will tell us how many people with MS have been infected by the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 and whether or not their treatments have affected their immune response to the virus. 

The information from this study will be used to plan for future coronavirus vaccine studies in people with MS on disease-modifying therapies. 

Why are we crowdfunding this research? We had been offered the funding for this study, but due to the funding crisis, this offer was withdrawn. As this research is very time-sensitive funding via traditional routes would take too long. 

We hope that if this study works we will be able to offer this postal antibody assay to the NHS, other patient groups and the general public. Imagine how being able to request a sample pack from a website, doing a fingerprick blood spot collection at home and posting in the request you can get to know if you have been infected by coronavirus or not. 

It is important that this study is not only about coronavirus and MS but has potential implications for the general population as well. This is why we are sp excited about getting this study done as soon as possible. 

Barts-MS

August 2020