Michael J. Fox Foundation Awards $2.1 Million To Improve Drug Delivery In Parkinson's Disease

Main Category: Parkinson's Disease
Article Date: 28 Mar 2009 - 2:00 PDT

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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.

Michael J. Fox Foundation
http://www.michaeljfox.org