Since its earliest days, The Michael J. Fox Foundation has been a field leader in the pursuit of Parkinson’ s biomarkers— objective measures of disease risk or progression. Through varied funding and strategic initiatives, the Foundation has sought definitive diagnostics and clinical trial endpoints to speed development of promising new treatments.
The Foundation launched the Parkinson’ s Progression Markers Initiative( PPMI) in 2010 to identify and validate measures of Parkinson’ s disease.
Six years later, the landmark clinical study is at 33 clinical sites around the world, has enrolled 1,500 volunteers, generated a data set accessed by researchers over 1 million times and received nearly 100 applications from scientific teams worldwide for use of the study’ s wellcharacterized biosamples.
Biotech and pharmaceutical companies increasingly look to PPMI as a model; its protocol and evolving body of results assist neuroscience groups in designing studies, integrating state-of-the-art technologies, modeling outcomes, and gaining buy-in from senior leadership who routinely are called on to make difficult funding decisions.
The dataset is now included as a resource in large-scale projects such as the Critical Path for Parkinson’ s Consortium, creating tools for optimized study design, and the planned National Institute of Health Accelerating Medicines Partnership- Parkinson’ s Disease program toward biomarker discovery and novel target identification.
Research conducted using PPMI assets has contributed to greater understanding of cognitive and mood changes in Parkinson’ s, helped establish a genetic risk profile that may form the basis of predicting who will get Parkinson’ s and refined clinical scales to measure disease progression over time. In addition to these important results, PPMI has proved the feasibility of finding specific populations( such as newly diagnosed or with genetic forms of PD) and has been a pioneer in using tools such as social media to help speed up enrollment and cut costs in a multi-year study.
2016 Annual Report 21