EMERYVILLE, Calif. & NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--KineMed, Inc., a pathway-based drug discovery and development company, has been awarded a grant of up to $694,441 (if all milestones are met) to conduct clinical studies toward a new biomarker-based treatment for Parkinson’s disease (PD). The funding, awarded under the Foundation’s Therapeutics Development Initiative, enables KineMed to assess if its proprietary biomarker measurements of microtubule function (MT) and axonal transport can be applied to people that it pioneered in pre-clinical animal models of PD. If KineMed’s clinical studies show that this cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarker for MT function (which can be sampled by means of a spinal tap, also known as a lumbar puncture) is as informative and predictive of disease outcome in humans as has been demonstrated in KineMed’s pre-clinical models, this will be an important step towards finding novel and more effective treatments for Parkinson’s disease (PD). Should MT dysfunction contribute to PD in some patients, those patients would benefit from drug interventions that increase MT stability, such as KineMed’s compounds presently in development. Results are expected in the first half of 2009.
