Tag: MJFF

A focus on GBA-Parkinson’s

~ Simon ~ 8 Comments

This week the ‘Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research’ and ‘The Silverstein Foundation for Parkinson’s with GBA’ announced that they are collaboratively awarding nearly US$3 million in research grants to fund studies investigating an enzyme called beta glucocerebrosidase (or GCase).

Why is this enzyme important to Parkinson’s?

In today’s post, we will discuss what GCase does, how it is associated with Parkinson’s, and review what some of these projects will be exploring.

Source: DenisonMag

This is Jonathan Silverstein.

He is a General Partner of Global Private Equity at OrbiMed – the world’s largest fully dedicated healthcare fund manager. During his time at OrbiMed, the company has invested in healthcare companies that have been involved with over 60 FDA approved products.

In February 2017 – at just 49 years of age – Jonathan was diagnosed with Parkinson’s.

Rather than simply accepting this diagnosis, however, Mr Silverstein decided to apply the skills that he has built over a long and successful career in funding biotech technology, and in March 2017, he and his wife, Natalie, set up the Silverstein Foundation for Parkinson’s with GBA.

The foundation has just one mission: “to actively pursue and invest in cutting edge research with the goal of discovering new therapies for the treatment of Parkinson’s Disease in GBA mutation carriers”

And it seeks to address this by achieving three goals:

  1. to find a way to halt the progression of Parkinson’s with GBA.
  2. to identify regenerative approaches to replace the damaged/lost cells
  3. to find preventative measures

This week, the Silverstein foundation and the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research made a big anoouncement.

The two organisations announced nearly US$3 million in grants to fund studies investigating an enzyme called glucocerebrosidase beta acid (or GCase).

And what exactly is glucocerebrosidase?

Continue reading “A focus on GBA-Parkinson’s” →

The Australian Parkinson’s Mission

~ Simon ~ 15 Comments

 

At 9am on the 30th January, 2019, the Australian Government Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt announced the initiation of the ‘Australian Parkinson’s Mission‘ – a very massive $30 million clinical trial programme that will be focused on potentially disease modifying treatments for Parkinson’s.

This huge endeavour will being with a large multi-arm study – involving 300 hundred participants and investigating 4 drugs (compared to a single placebo). It will be a first of its kind project in the world targeting Parkinson’s.

This is a very exciting development for the Parkinson’s community!

In today’s post, we will discuss what we currently know about the Australian Parkinson’s Mission project, what we hope to see resulting from the initiative, and why this is a tremendous step forward for the international Parkinson’s community as a whole.

 

Source: Atom

Being a patriotic kiwi there is always enormous potential to make fun when writing a post about any Parkinson’s-related news coming out of Australia. New Zealand and Australia have always had a big brother/little brother kind of relationship (and just so we are clear: NZ is the big brother!).

But today is different.

It is very strange to say, but… today… I am actually very proud of you Australia.

At 9am this morning at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, Greg Hunt – the Federal Health Minister of the Australian Government – announced the commencement of a major clinical trial initiative (named ‘The Australian Parkinson’s Mission‘), which is going to be a very large, world-leading clinical programme focused on potentially disease modifying drugs for Parkinson’s (Click here to read the press release).

Struth mate!!! This sounds fantastic. What do we know about the study?

Continue reading “The Australian Parkinson’s Mission” →

From Alchemy to Alkahest

~ Simon ~ Leave a comment

 

Numerous readers have asked about a curious new clinical trial being conducted by a biotech firm called ‘Alkahest’. The company has recently initiated a large (90 participants) Phase II study of their Parkinson’s-focused treatment called GRF6021.

This is an experimental, intravenously-administered treatment, which is derived from a components of blood.

In today’s post, we will discuss some of the research behind GRF6021, what this new clinical trial involves, and have a look at some other interesting Parkinson’s-related activities that Alkahest has ongoing.

 

Source: SFN

The Society of Neuroscience meeting is the largest annual research conference on brain relelated research, bringing approximately 40,000 neuroscientists together in October. At the Society of Neuroscience meeting in San Diego this year, however, there was considerable interest focused on several presentations dealing with blood.

The first presentation was from a group of researchers at the University of California, San Francisco.

The research team – led by group leader Dr Saul Villeda – were presenting new data suggesting that circulating immune cells were most likely responsible for the age-related reduction in neurogenesis (formation of new neurons) that occurs in certain areas of the brain (Click here to read the abstract for this presentation). They reported that the aged hematopoietic (blood) system led to impaired neurogenesis. Their take-home-message: the older the blood system, the less new cells being produced by the brain.

Sounds interesting right?

Well, at the same time in another part of the conference a second group of researchers were presenting equally impressive data: They have zeroed in of a small fraction of normal, young blood that they believe has interesting properties, particularly in reversing the cognitive deficits associated with aging mice (Click here to read the abstract of this presentation).

Their research has even narrowed down to a specific protein, called C-C chemokine receptor type 3 (or CCR3), which when inhibited was found to improve cognitive function and decreased neuroinflammation in aged mice (Click here to read the abstract of the presentation).

The humble lab mouse. Source: Pinterest

But specifically for our interests here at the SoPD, these same researchers displayed data which demonstrated that treatment with a novel fraction of human plasma resulted in significant improvements in motor function, cell survival and neuroinflammation three weeks after treatment in multiple mouse models of Parkinson’s (Click here to read the abstract of the poster).

(PLEASE NOTE: The author of this blog was not present at the SFN meeting and is working solely with the abstracts provided)

This second group of scientists were from a company called Alkahest, and they have recently started a clinical trial for people with Parkinson’s based on these results. That trial has garnered quite a bit of interest in the Parkinson’s community.What do Alkahest do?

Continue reading “From Alchemy to Alkahest” →

Predicting subtypes of Parkinson’s

~ Simon ~ 9 Comments

Today’s post involves massive multidimensional datasets, machine learning, and being able to predict the future.

Sound interesting?

Researchers are the National Institute on Aging and the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign have analysed longitudinal clinical data from the Parkinson’s Progression Marker Initiative (PPMI) and they have found three distinct disease subtypes with highly predictable progression rates.

NOTE: Reading about disease progression may be distressing for some readers, but please understand that this type of research is critical to helping us better understand Parkinson’s.

In today’s post, we will look at what the researchers found and discuss what this result could mean for the Parkinson’s community.

Source: ScienceMag

Today I am going to break one of the unwritten rules of science communication (again) .

Until a research report has been through the peer-review process you probably should not be discussing the results in the public domain.

But in this particular case, the research is really interesting. And it has been made available on the OPEN ACCESS preprint depository website called BioRxiv.

Source: BioRxiv

I should add that this is not the first time we have discussed manuscripts on BioRxiv (Click here and here to read other post on Biorxiv manuscripts). We are regular rule breakers here at the SoPD.

So what does the new research investigate?

Continue reading “Predicting subtypes of Parkinson’s” →

When GCase is away, the GSLs will play

~ Simon ~ 7 Comments

 

 

New research published in the last week provides further experimental support for numerous clinical trials currently being conducted, including one by the biotech company Sanofi Genzyme.

Researchers have demonstrated that tiny proteins which usually reside on the outer wall of cells could be playing an important role in the protein clustering (or aggregation) that characterises Parkinson’s. 

In today’s post we will look at this new research and discuss what it could mean for the on going clinical trials for Parkinson’s. 

Source: Stevedalepetworld

The proverb ‘When the cat is away, the mice will play’ has Latin origins.

Dum felis dormit, mus gaudet et exsi litantro (or ‘When the cat falls asleep, the mouse rejoices and leaps from the hole’)

It was also used in the early fourteenth century by the French: Ou chat na rat regne (‘Where there is no cat, the rat is king’).

And then Will Shakespeare used it in Henry the Fifth(1599), Act I, Scene II:

Westmoreland, speaking with King Henry V, Gloucester, Bedford, Exeter and Warwick
“But there’s a saying very old and true,
‘If that you will France win,
Then with Scotland first begin:’
For once the eagle England being in prey,
To her unguarded nest the weasel Scot
Comes sneaking and so sucks her princely eggs,
Playing the mouse in absence of the cat,
To tear and havoc more than she can eat”

The phrase first appears in its modern form in the United States in the literary and political magazine The Port folio in 1802 (2; 323):

Interesting. But what does any of this have to do with Parkinson’s?

Continue reading “When GCase is away, the GSLs will play” →

2017 – Year in Review: A good vintage

~ Simon ~ 13 Comments

At the end of each year, it is a useful practise to review the triumphs (and failures) of the past 12 months. It is an exercise of putting everything into perspective. 

2017 has been an incredible year for Parkinson’s research.

And while I appreciate that statements like that will not bring much comfort to those living with the condition, it is still important to consider and appreciate what has been achieved over the last 12 months.

In this post, we will try to provide a summary of the Parkinson’s-related research that has taken place in 2017 (Be warned: this is a VERY long post!)

The number of research reports and clinical trial studies per year since 1817

As everyone in the Parkinson’s community is aware, in 2017 we were observing the 200th anniversary of the first description of the condition by James Parkinson (1817). But what a lot of people fail to appreciate is how little research was actually done on the condition during the first 180 years of that period.

The graphs above highlight the number of Parkinson’s-related research reports published (top graph) and the number of clinical study reports published (bottom graph) during each of the last 200 years (according to the online research search engine Pubmed – as determined by searching for the term “Parkinson’s“).

PLEASE NOTE, however, that of the approximately 97,000 “Parkinson’s“-related research reports published during the last 200 years, just under 74,000 of them have been published in the last 20 years.

That means that 3/4 of all the published research on Parkinson’s has been conducted in just the last 2 decades.

And a huge chunk of that (almost 10% – 7321 publications) has been done in 2017 only.

So what happened in 2017? Continue reading “2017 – Year in Review: A good vintage” →

Nilotinib: the other phase II trial

~ Simon ~ 12 Comments

DSK_4634s

In October 2015, researchers from Georgetown University announced the results of a small clinical trial that got the Parkinson’s community very excited. The study involved a cancer drug called Nilotinib, and the results were rather spectacular.

What happened next, however, was a bizarre sequence of disagreements over exactly what should happen next and who should be taking the drug forward. This caused delays to subsequent clinical trials and confusion for the entire Parkinson’s community who were so keenly awaiting fresh news about the drug.

Earlier this year, Georgetown University announced their own follow up phase II clinical trial and this week a second phase II clinical trial funded by a group led by the Michael J Fox foundation was initiated.

In todays post we will look at what Nilotinib is, how it apparently works for Parkinson’s disease, what is planned with the new trial, and how it differs from the  ongoing Georgetown Phase II trial.

FDA-deeming-regulations

The FDA. Source: Vaporb2b

This week the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given approval for a multi-centre, double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled Phase IIa clinical trial to be conducted, testing the safety and tolerability of Nilotinib (Tasigna) in Parkinson’s disease.

This is exciting and welcomed news.

What is Nilotinib?

Nilotinib (pronounced ‘nil-ot-in-ib’ and also known by its brand name Tasigna) is a small-molecule tyrosine kinase inhibitor, that has been approved for the treatment of imatinib-resistant chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML).

What does any that mean?

Basically, it is the drug that is used to treat a type of blood cancer (leukemia) when the other drugs have failed. It was approved for treating this cancer by the FDA in 2007.

Continue reading “Nilotinib: the other phase II trial” →