NEW YORK – The Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH) on Wednesday announced a new public-private research project to discover and validate biomarkers for Parkinson's disease.
The project, dubbed the Accelerating Medicines Partnership in Parkinson's Disease and Related Disorders (AMP PDRD), is part of a broader AMP program at the FNIH that supports precompetitive research to understand disease pathways and support drug discovery. These programs are managed by the FNIH, a nonprofit established by Congress to support the US National Institutes of Health's mission but that is independent from the agency. The AMP projects are funded by public and private organizations.
The new Parkinson's project is funded with an estimated $21 million from the NIH's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and the National Institute on Aging, the US Food and Drug Administration, the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research, Aligning Science Across Parkinson's, C2N Diagnostics, CurePSP, Denali Therapeutics, GSK, and Sanofi.
The goal of the new project is to identify biomarkers that better differentiate Parkinson's from related neurodegenerative disorders with similar symptoms — such as multiple system atrophy, Lewy body dementia, and progressive supranuclear palsy — which the FNIH says will lead to earlier diagnoses and interventions, as well as recruitment into clinical trials of new drugs.
Parkinson's root cause isn't known, but risk factors include age, genetics, and environmental exposures. Currently, treatments for Parkinson's can manage symptoms, but there isn't a cure.
"Although significant progress has been made in Parkinson's research, there remains a need to deepen our understanding of how this disease begins and progresses over a long period of time," FNIH President and CEO Julie Gerberding said in a statement.
Recently, Parkinson's doctors and researchers have proposed defining and staging Parkinson's based on the presence of the protein alpha-synuclein, which is measured through a spinal tap or skin biopsy. The FNIH's new AMP project in Parkinson's seeks to identify additional biomarkers that can be measured through blood or saliva, which are more convenient testing methods.
The AMP PDRD effort builds on an earlier project, the AMP in Parkinson's Disease, which brought together data from previous studies and collected biospecimen samples to support development of disease-modifying therapies for Parkinson's, and which established a platform that hosts genetic and other biological analysis data. The new Parkinson's project will add information to these datasets and analyze them to identify biomarkers and targets for drug development.
"Data sharing at this scale will accelerate the field’s progress by improving drug trials and fueling the clinical pipeline," Todd Sherer, chief mission officer at the Michael J. Fox Foundation, said in a statement. "The Michael J. Fox Foundation looks forward to the results of bringing so many knowledgebases together through this public-private consortium."