Alan Jackson – Last Call tour
Alan Jackson’s “Last Call: One More for the Road” tour has officially wrapped, and the number is in: more than $2.25 million was raised for the CMT Research Foundation through ticket sales, matching contributions, and the wave of awareness Alan brought to Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease along the way.
CMT doesn’t define Alan’s legacy. His career speaks for itself: nearly four decades of true country music, dozens of number one hits, and a catalog that helped shape the sound of an entire genre. However, what he chose to do with this tour will make a difference for the 3 million people living with CMT worldwide. Read more from Alan’s team here.
What This Means for CMT Research
For our community, this isn’t just a number. It’s momentum. CMT progressively damages the peripheral nerves, causing muscle weakness, loss of sensation, and difficulty walking, and there is still no approved treatment. Every dollar raised through this tour goes directly toward changing that.
Right now, that funding is supporting real, active progress:
- A smartphone tool that can track CMT progression. Researchers at Columbia University are using AI to pull detailed movement data from a simple video, which could let patients and scientists monitor disease changes from anywhere, without years of waiting.
- Smarter drug delivery to the nerve. A team at Loyola University Chicago has engineered nanoparticles disguised to travel straight to damaged nerve tissue, a project that has already hit its final research milestone and is now moving toward testing with actual therapies.
- Matching the right genetic treatment to CMT2A. At UC San Diego, researchers are reprogramming patient cells into nerve cells to compare genetic medicines head-to-head and find the strongest candidates for clinical trials.
- A blood test to measure whether treatment is working. Johns Hopkins researchers are developing a test that could track disease activity in CMT2C in real time, which would make future clinical trials faster and more reliable.
You can read the full research update, including more detail on each of these projects, here.
The Road Ahead
This tour introduced thousands of new people to CMT who had never heard of it before, and the funding it generated is already moving science forward.
