BETTER TREATMENT PIPELINES
THE MICHAEL J. FOX FOUNDATION 2025 YEAR IN REVIEW
A Focus on Stopping PD in its Tracks Disease-modifying Drugs Are Potential Game-Changers
Every medication your doctor prescribes has traveled a similar and risk-filled road: decades of dedicated research and hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, with no guarantee of FDA approval. But while the path is far from guaranteed, the Foundation exists to ensure that the efforts to come up with new and better treatments for PD are unceasing. In fact, today’ s pipeline brims with more than 170 of these moonshots— treatments that are in active( or soon-to-be-active) clinical testing.
Many of these therapies advanced into human trials— thanks either to direct funding from MJFF, or to Foundation-provided research, tools and resources— enabling drug makers to move forward more confidently. This essential support, which only is possible because of our generous donors, continues to sustain vital research and deepen the drug development landscape.
Therapies to Slow or Stop Parkinson’ s
About half of all Parkinson’ s drugs in human testing today seek to slow disease by targeting the processes in the brain that lead to the cell damage that results in PD’ s many symptoms. Continued progress toward these disease-modifying therapies, so called because these treatments target the underlying cause of a disease, raises hope for treatments capable of slowing the worsening of PD symptoms— and even preventing them from developing at all.
Current disease-modifying therapy research centers on a range of potentially promising biology. One major area of focus is drugs targeting alpha-synuclein, the misfolded proteins that clump in the brain and are a hallmark of Parkinson’ s disease. Similar efforts in the Alzheimer’ s field, targeting misfolded beta-amyloid proteins, ultimately led to the first approved drugs to reduce beta-amyloid buildup and help slow progression of that disease.
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