PatientsLikeMe Teams Up With 23andMe to Help Parkinson's Patients

CAMBRIDGE, MA, Jun 09 (MARKET WIRE) --
PatientsLikeMe, the first community-based personalized medicine platform
for people with life-changing conditions, and 23andMe, the world's
leading personal genomics company, announce a partnership today to help
people with Parkinson's disease. PatientsLikeMe is teaming with 23andMe
on its effort to recruit 10,000 people with Parkinson's for a massive
study of the disease, and give patients a way to learn more about their
personal genetics.

"Today, technology is moving faster than the research establishment," says
James Heywood, co-founder and chairman of PatientsLikeMe. "We are excited
to see what happens when you give patients the ability to see variations
of their disease and compare it to their own, while enabling them to
easily define their personal genomics."

As part of the project, PatientsLikeMe will be adding its genetics
phenotyping tools currently available in its ALS community to the
Parkinson's community in July. Patients will be able to manually enter
their Parkinson's genetic mutation while having the ability to search for
others who share the same mutation. The new features will help
PatientsLikeMe researchers use new data to evaluate the effects of
genetics on variation in the Parkinson's population.

"PatientsLikeMe has done an extraordinary job of giving people with
Parkinson's the opportunity to learn about their disease by connecting
with other Parkinson's patients," says 23andMe co-founder, Linda Avey.
"This partnership will go a long way to advancing the goal of the 23andMe
Parkinson's study, which is to find genetic and environmental modifiers to
PD, its symptoms and progression, as well as the effectiveness of
different treatments."

Heywood and Avey will both be speaking at the inaugural Consumer Genetics
Conference this week in Boston.

About PatientsLikeMe

PatientsLikeMe (www.patientslikeme.com) is the leading online health
community for patients with life-changing conditions. PatientsLikeMe
creates new knowledge by charting the real-world course of disease through
the shared experiences of patients with ALS, multiple sclerosis,
Parkinson's, HIV, and mood conditions (including depression, bipolar,
anxiety, OCD and PTSD) and fibromyalgia. While patients interact to help
improve their outcomes, the data they provide helps researchers learn how
these diseases act in the real world. PatientsLikeMe endeavors to create
the largest repository of real-world disease information to help
accelerate the discovery of new, more effective treatments.

CONTACT:
Lori Scanlon
617.475.3294
Email Contact

Copyright 2009, Market Wire, All rights reserved.

-0-