Advancing Parkinson’s Treatments Innovations Grant

PDF’s Advancing Parkinson’s Treatments (APT) Innovations Grant funds innovative programs that facilitate the movement of treatments from “bench to bedside.”

The program is built on the belief that all too often, for a variety of reasons, potential treatments get “stuck” in the research pipeline. APT aims to remove barriers that might prevent treatments from reaching people with Parkinson’s.

The Parkinson Study Group, a nonprofit, cooperative group of Parkinson’s disease experts from medical centers in the US and Canada who coordinate clinical trials, is a recent grant recipient.

Parkinson Study Group

The PDF-APT grant to the Parkinson’s Study Group (PSG) has been used to fund the Parkinson’s Study Group since 2004. PSG has used the funding to advance clinical research in several ways.

Parkinson’s Database Efficiencies
One of these has been to foster efficiencies in Parkinson’s database management by funding the inventory, assessment and integration of PD study databases among all the research projects that are managed by PSG. The focus of this integration has been to take the databases of PSG studies that were sponsored by the NIH and other organizations over the last 20 years and put them into a format that is usable for retrospective analyses. These retrospective analyses or “data mining” efforts allow the matchless resource that is represented by a large clinical trial database to be used for secondary analyses that go far beyond the purpose of the original trials.

Databuilding
PDF has taken the lead in funding another data-building initiative by supporting a PSG project known as FOUND (Follow-up of Persons with Neurologic Diseases) that is run by Dr. Caroline Tanner at The Parkinson’s Institute in Sunnyvale, CA . The primary objective of this study is to gather long-term data on Parkinson’s disease progression, treatment response, complications and outcomes.

The FOUND study acquires this information by following-up with clinical trial participants after the end of a trial through questionnaires that are mailed three times a year. This type of project is especially important in chronic diseases such as Parkinson’s, as the data can help provide scientists with a more complete picture of the disease and how it develops over time. Studies such as this can also help clinical investigators gather information about nonmotor aspects of PD, which are often the most troublesome to people living with Parkinson’s.

In the same spirit of encouraging young investigators to pursue careers in Parkinson’s, PDF has provided resources to PSG for training new investigators who may not yet have had experience in developing and managing clinical trials.

This training focuses on such areas as good clinical practices and ethics in research; standardized training on the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale; standardized training on “nonmotor” aspects of Parkinson’s, including those involving mood and cognition; and use of electronic data capture systems. The main objective is to train and increase the number of researchers who are able to conduct clinical trials, with the intent of widening the pool of qualified Parkinson’s investigators — thereby accelerating the pace of clinical studies and the development of new treatments.

Since 2002, PDF has committed close to $1.2 million to this essential component of the research equation.