NEW YORK, March 27 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Michael J. Fox Foundation announced that it has awarded approximately $2.1 million total to seven research teams working to improve drug delivery for Parkinson’s disease.
The funding was awarded under the Foundation’s Improving Delivery of Parkinson’s Disease Therapeutics to the Brain. The program is designed to address two major challenges to the development of transformative treatments for Parkinson’s disease: the need for non-invasive drug delivery technologies allowing therapeutics to cross the blood-brain barrier, and the need to more precisely understand how molecules move inside the central nervous system in order to target treatments to specific regions of the brain.
Funded projects are listed below. Full information on funded projects, including grant abstracts and researcher bios, is available on the Foundation’s Searchable Database of Funded Grants.
Image-guided Gene Delivery for Parkinson’s
Krysztof Bankiewicz, M.D., Ph.D., University of California, San Francisco
Convection Enhanced Delivery to Study the Pathophysiology Underlying the Clinical Features of Human Parkinson’s Disease
Jeff Elias, M.D., University of Virginia, and Russell Lonser, M.D., National Institute of Neurodegenerative Disease and Stroke
Real-time Monitoring of Targeting, Delivery, and Spread of Therapeutic Agents in the Brain
Samir Jafri, Ph.D., University of Maryland, Baltimore, and Cha-Min Tang, M.D., Ph.D., University of Maryland School of Medicine
Utilizing Novel Tracers to Determine the Distribution of Therapeutic Agents In Vivo
RamakrishnaVenugopalan, Ph.D., Codman and Shurtleff, Inc.
Deep Brain Imaging to Determine the Movement of Compounds Relevant to Parkinson’s Disease
Mark Saltzman, Ph.D., and Michael Levene, Ph.D., Yale University
Novel Antibodies for the Delivery of Parkinson’s Therapeutics
Eric Shusta, Ph.D., and Clive Svendson, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, Madison
Intranasal Gene Therapy: Next Steps
Barbara Lee Waszczak, Ph.D., Northeastern University
About The Michael J. Fox Foundation
The Michael J. Fox Foundation is dedicated to ensuring the development of better treatments, and ultimately a cure, for Parkinson’s disease through an aggressively funded research agenda. MJFF has funded over $142 million in research to date.
CONTACT: Holly Barkhymer, +1-212-509-0995 x242,
hbarkhymer@michaeljfox.org, or Research Contact: Todd Sherer, Ph.D.,
+1-212-509-0995 x243, tsherer@michaeljfox.org, both of the Michael J. Fox
Foundation
