- The new MS Clinical Imaging and Data Resource contains clinical trial data provided by four pharmaceutical companies
- Data will be made available to the MS research community for further study
- The aim is a better understanding of progressive MS to accelerate the path to new effective therapies
In August 2025, the International Progressive MS Alliance announced the launch of its MS Clinical and Imaging Data Resource (CIDR). The resource contains 72,000 MRI scans and clinical data from 13,500 people affected by progressive MS who participated in one of many high-quality clinical trials. Valued at over €685 million, this collection includes information from over 200,000 clinical visits. The data will be made available to the MS research community to conduct further research on progressive MS. The goal is to help accelerate the understanding of MS progression and speed up clinical trials aiming to find solutions for progressive MS.
The need
Effective treatments for progressive MS remain an urgent unmet need. A significant part of the problem is that we don’t have a good understanding of the mechanisms that drive MS progression. This knowledge gap has been the major roadblock to developing new effective therapies.
There are also no fully validated blood tests to predict disease progression. Clinical trials in progressive MS therefore rely on measurements such as the progression of disability assessed over years. This means a slower path to answers, which for Phase III trials, can cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Towards answers for progressive MS
The International Progressive MS Alliance is a global collaboration formed in 2012 as to address the unmet needs of people with progressive MS.
It brings together MS organisations, researchers, health professionals, the pharmaceutical industry, companies, trusts, foundations, donors and people affected by progressive MS. MS Australia is a managing member of the Alliance.
A key goal of the Alliance has been to pool and share data globally, to help find answers.
True global partnership
The CIDR has been developed by the Alliance in partnership with several stakeholders.
People with MS who have participated in clinical trials have generously provided their information to be used anonymously.
Pharmaceutical industry partners Biogen, Roche, Novartis, Sanofi have donated their massive clinical trial data sets. These include MRIs, clinic visits and other data from nearly all recent MS trials from all the big pharmaceutical companies in the MS space, with an estimated value over €685 million.
Academic researchers of The EPITOME Collaborative Research Network, funded by the Alliance and led by Professor Douglas Arnold of McGill University, Montréal, are leading the research effort.
AI: mining new insights in the sea of big data
The data has been collated with state-of-the-art tools such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in mind, with the goal of finding complex patterns that single researchers can not find alone.
Dr Tim Coetzee, PhD, is the President and CEO of the US National MS Society and Executive Committee Chair of the International Progressive MS Alliance.
“It’s staggering how much data we have, and the incredible possibility it has for the future” he noted in a recent Alliance article.
“We start to see patterns of how MS develops and how it progresses, including factors that contribute,” he continues. “You wouldn’t see that from one trial, but in aggregate, that’s when you start to see it.”
Accessing the data
Applications to access the data will commence in Spring (southern hemisphere) and will be assessed by a data review committee including a person living with progressive MS.
Projects must be focused on understanding disease progression, such as modelling the “natural history” of progressive MS, biomarkers of outcomes, simulations (such as the use of “digital twins”) and finding new outcome measures of progression.
The future of MS treatment
Dr Coetzee’s hope is that one day, doctors will be able to say to people with MS, ‘Based on your latest MRI and what the software is telling me, your MS progression remains stable,’ or ‘Look, it suggests that the disease might be more active, so let’s switch to a different therapy.
This new global data resource exemplifies the power of bringing the world together to answer the big questions and find solutions for progressive MS.
