Posted on February 23, 2013

MJFF Announces New Research Programs

The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research has announced the launch of four new programs to help advance research on treatments and a cure for the disease.

Open to researchers from academia and industry, the programs will support projects promoting Parkinson's disease drug development centered on the most promising therapeutic pathways and targets. The foundation also will provide access to valuable biospecimen tissue resources.

New programs include LRRK2 Pharmacodynamic Assays 2013, which will support projects focused on identifying, generating, and validating measures and assays of the function of the protein leucine-rich repeat kinase 2 (LRRK2) that accelerate development and testing of LRRK2-targeted therapies for PD; the Therapeutic Pipeline Program, which will fund therapeutic development around targets within pathways that have been implicated in altering the course of PD; and the Synuclein Therapeutic Acceleration Program, which will support mid to late-stage pre-clinical development work focused on moving therapeutic compounds and biologics targeting alpha-synuclein into clinical testing.

The organization also announced that four other programs are now accepting applications. A complete list of the foundation's open funding programs can be found on its Web site.