BETTER TREATMENT PIPELINES
“ The right target, the right drug, the right patient.” How does this phrase guide research at the Foundation?
THE MICHAEL J. FOX FOUNDATION 2025 YEAR IN REVIEW
The more we learn about Parkinson’ s disease, the more we confirm that it looks different in each person. The challenge is that if each person’ s Parkinson’ s is different, then there are likely few— if any— therapies that work the same for every single person. One day, we aim to match individuals to specific treatments based on their personal Parkinson’ s biology.
How does Targets to Therapies further this objective?
There are some targets for Parkinson’ s therapies that you might recognize as they receive a lot of scrutiny: alpha-synuclein, LRRK2 and GBA1, for example. But there are hundreds of other potential drug targets where we don’ t have nearly as much information or active research.
Targets to Therapies is about finding the most promising of those underexplored targets and filling in gaps. We’ re assembling networks of experts for each of more than 20 targets, with important collaborations across key academic and industry stakeholders. We’ re funding research to tell us what we don’ t know. Then we’ re going to make those findings available to everyone, to entice drug developers to develop treatments using what we’ ve learned and build confidence around existing drug development efforts to advance them from pre-clinical to clinical research and beyond.
How does the initiative turn targets into therapies?
The promise that we see in well-established targets comes from years of de-risking research that made the target more appealing for drug developers by taking steps like confirming safety data. We want to de-risk other targets we identify through this program. It’ s the fastest way to bring more partners into the space, increasing the likelihood that these targets lead to therapies.
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