Emeritus Professor Nick Willcox built up a store of approximately 6,000 blood and tissue samples from over 2,000 people with myasthenia gravis dating back to 1980. These samples held at the University of Oxford are an irreplaceable and unique resource, which could help provide insight into why people develop myasthenia gravis and how those people respond to treatments.

MyArchive is a proposed method to safeguard the legacy of the donors and make sure that these samples are used in the best possible way to advance research into myasthenia. MyArchive provides access to these samples to research groups who can help to answer key research questions about disease mechanisms and their trends over time.

Panel of researchers

A panel of researchers based in Oxford coordinates the supply of MyArchive samples to a wide collaborative network to ensure that individual donor’s samples are used for those experiments most likely to lead to breakthroughs in our understanding or treatment of myasthenia. MyArchive also promotes and enables excellence in research to best inform people with myasthenia about their condition and identify possible new treatments for the future.

Supporting MyArchive has enabled researchers around the world to benefit from access to an irreplaceable archive of tissues from people with myasthenia.

Clear benefits

This has clear benefits to people with myasthenia gravis, since the diverse research projects that would be possible with MyArchive have both basic immunological and translational impact on the care of people with myasthenia gravis. These research avenues will likely cast light on the causes and potentially identify new targets for treatment avenues in myasthenia.

Myaware also honours the legacy of those people with myasthenia gravis, who so kindly donated samples to Emeritus Professor Nick Willcox’s team since 1980, and so supporting this archive ensures that their samples are best used to help research in myasthenia gravis

To read the first publication based on samples acquired from MyArchive, click here.

Visit the MyArchive website