Michael J. Fox Foundation Awards $2.7 Million for Industry Efforts to Speed New Parkinson's...

Michael J. Fox Foundation Awards $2.7 Million for Industry Efforts to Speed
New Parkinson's Therapeutics

Latest awards under Therapeutics Development Initiative bring MJFF's current
active industry collaborations to 23; next deadline January 20, 2009

NEW YORK, July 22 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- As part of its mission to speed
delivery of transformative treatments and a cure for Parkinson's disease, The
Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research has awarded $2.7 million in
total funding to six industry research teams. The awards were granted under
MJFF's Therapeutics Development Initiative (TDI) program. Open exclusively to
researchers at biotech and pharmaceutical companies, TDI is the cornerstone of
the Foundation's venture philanthropy efforts to spark and expand industry
investment in PD drug development. In an increasingly risk-averse research
funding climate, TDI helps to push promising candidate therapeutics forward in
industry pipelines by allowing the Foundation to share the risk of drug
development.

"At MJFF, our job is to do whatever it takes to speed therapeutics development
for Parkinson's disease," said Katie Hood, CEO of The Michael J. Fox
Foundation. "Early on we realized the critical importance of forging financial
and intellectual partnerships with industry as well as academic research
teams. Our private philanthropy dollars -- raised largely from patients
themselves -- have a critical role to play in 'de-risking' therapeutic targets
for industry investment in order to keep the most promising ideas moving
forward toward clinical testing and pharmacy shelves."

Funded projects focus on:

-- Developing a vaccine that could protect against toxicity of the
PD-implicated protein alpha-synuclein (Ingeborg Muehldorfer, Ph.D., Rentschler
Biotechnologie, Laupheim, Germany);
-- Improving delivery of the gold-standard Parkinson's treatment, levodopa,
which could lessen debilitating side effects of the drug including
dyskinesias, the uncontrollable movements that arise with long-term levodopa
therapy (Verne Cowles, Ph.D., and S. Y. Eddie Hou, Ph.D., Depomed, Inc.,
Menlo Park, California);
-- Validating a novel metabolomic diagnostic test for PD (Hyman Schipper, MD,
PhD, FRCPC, and Peter Roos, Ph.D., Molecular Biometrics, Montreal, Canada);
-- Finding new ways to target the PD-implicated gene LRRK2 (Vicki Nienaber,
Ph.D., Zenobia Therapeutics, San Diego, California);
-- Investigating methods to modulate the new PD target GPR88, a protein
receptor believed to play a role in dopaminergic function (Thomas Sager,
Ph.D., and Kenneth Thirstrup, Ph.D., H. Lundbeck A/S, Valby, Denmark); and
-- Exploring gene-knockout techniques to protect against oxidative stress
implicated in the neuronal loss that characterizes PD (Kenneth Thirstrup, PhD,
and Thomas Sager, Ph.D., H. Lundbeck A/S, Valby, Denmark).

Detailed grant abstracts and researchers' bios are available at
www.michaeljfox.org.

While The Michael J. Fox Foundation has funded industry research teams since
its inception, it launched the Therapeutics Development Initiative in 2006 as
part of a proactive initiative to capture the attention and imagination of
for-profit decision-makers and encourage them to allocate resources to
Parkinson's drug development. In 2007, recognizing the increasing
sophistication of many university drug development programs, the Foundation
added a one-time-only "academic track" to fund non-industry-based teams
working toward transformative PD treatments. The Foundation has committed
about $24 million in total funding to industry to date. Slightly less than
half of that total (over $10 million) has gone to the 20 projects funded
through the Therapeutics Development Initiative thus far.

The deadline for pre-proposals under the next $2.5-million, industry-only
funding round of TDI is January 20, 2009. The program will again seek to
support preclinical development of Parkinson's disease therapies with
potential to fundamentally alter disease course and/or improve treatment of
symptoms above and beyond current standards of care. Proposals must focus on
key and critical preclinical studies necessary for developing, optimizing and
evaluating therapeutic strategies that if successful can move into human
testing. Full information for prospective applicants is available at
www.michaeljfox.org.

About The Michael J. Fox Foundation
Founded in 2000, The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research is
dedicated to ensuring the development of a cure for Parkinson's disease within
the coming decade through an aggressively funded research agenda. The
Foundation has funded approximately $126 million in research to date.

SOURCE Michael J. Fox Foundation

Media: Holly Barkhymer, +1-212-509-0995 x242, hbarkhymer@michaeljfox.org,
Research: Mark Frasier, Ph.D., +1-212-509-0995 x244, mfrasier@michaeljfox.org,
both of the Michael J. Fox Foundation