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Last week the first results of an ambitious project are being shared with the Parkinson’s community. Clinicrowd is a “crowd sourcing platform exploring disease treatments that Pharma companies have no interest to investigate or promote”. Their initial focus was Parkinson’s (though they now have additional projects for other medical conditions), and their first experimental treatment for Parkinson’s was the sweetener ‘mannitol’. The results provide some interesting insights into the properties of mannitol and into crowd sourced projects. In today’s post, we will discuss what mannitol is, why it is interesting, outline the Clinicrowd project, and review the results of the mannitol study. |
Mannitol. Source: Qualifirst
Without a shadow of doubt, one of the most popular topics searched for on this website is ‘mannitol’.
In 2017, the second most visited page on the site (behind only the main/home page) was a post called “Update – Mannitol and Parkinson’s“. And as if to put an exclamation point on the matter, the fourth most visited page was “Manna from heaven? Mannitol and Parkinson’s”
Understand though, that both of these posts were actually written in 2016!
Throughout 2017-18, not a week has gone by without someone contacting me to ask about mannitol and the ‘CliniCrowd‘ project.
Thus, it brings me great pleasure to sit down tonight and write this post.
What is mannitol?
The Science of Parkinson's 