Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research Announces $1.2 Million to Advance Development of Drug Targets

The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research (MJFF) announced $1.2 million in total awards to four research teams working to advance potentially disease-modifying therapeutic targets for PD along the drug development pipeline. The funding was awarded under the Novel Approaches to Drug Discovery for Parkinson's Disease program, made possible by funding from Elan Corp., plc, a
neuroscience-based biotechnology company.

"For successful translation into real-world PD therapies, early stage therapeutic approaches must be chaperoned through the necessary preclinical and clinical stages of drug development," says Sarah Orsay, MJFF's CEO. "The Foundation uses creative strategies to provide the opportunity for researchers working on novel therapeutic strategies to partner with first class, large industry organizations. If projects funded under Novel Approaches to Drug Discovery for Parkinson's Disease warrant further development, Elan has the option to participate more actively and further
the progress made by the awardees -- taking us that much closer to our
shared goal of delivering new treatments to patients."

Novel Approaches complements the foundation's annual Target Validation initiative, whose awardees were announced last month. Whereas the latter program supports initial work to determine the validity of cellular proteins and pathways as potentially promising drug targets, Novel Approaches seeks to push work forward in developing therapies against targets that already have some promising initial data. Both programs provide critical resources for underfunded stages of the drug development process and reflect the Foundation's emphasis on bridging early discovery work and late-stage translational research to reduce industry's risk around investment in new PD therapeutics.

The Novel Approaches program is also an important element of the foundation's increasing engagement with pharmaceutical and biotech company partners. This engagement is multi-pronged, including not only funding industry researchers under any Foundation initiative, but also working with companies as strategic partners to accelerate the rate at which new PD therapeutics are brought to market. Awardees under Novel Approaches include both academic and industry scientists.

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