EMERYVILLE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--KineMed Inc. (www.kinemed.com) announced today that it is among the first funding awardees to be showcased by The Michael J. Fox Foundation Industry Partnering Program.
The Michael J. Fox Foundation (MJFF) sponsored KineMed’s recently completed pathway-based biomarker study of neuronal function, which measures differences in brain neuronal transport function in Parkinson’s patients compared to healthy controls. Using KineMed’s proprietary proteome dynamics technology, this research showed, for the first time, abnormalities in biochemical pathways in neurons in the living brain that appear to be associated with the pathogenesis and disease progression of Parkinson’s disease.
“Our foundation is devoted to developing direct, proactive relationships with industry, in order to drive advances toward better treatments for Parkinson’s disease,” said Todd Sherer, PhD, CEO of MJFF. “The Partnering Program encourages select awardees like KineMed to publicly highlight their organization, team, and projects, providing a formalized process for encouraging the kind of collaboration needed to make progress.”
“We are deeply honored to have our contribution recognized by The Michael J. Fox Foundation. We welcome new alliances with pharmaceutical collaborators interested in using the cutting edge techniques that we have brought to bear on the challenge of Parkinson’s disease,” KineMed’s President & CEO, David Fineman said. “Research over the last decade has revealed this disease to be much more complex than was thought at first, and we now understand why earlier generations of drugs that focused on a single metric, such as dopamine level, could not provide a cure. Just as a physician is able to directly ask a patient whether he’s feeling better, a single cerebrospinal fluid sample allows us to directly query the overall health of living neurons within the brain. Our unique ability to sample several pathways simultaneously, not only detects whether patients have Parkinson’s or other neurodegenerative conditions, but also enables us to monitor progression and therapeutic reversal of underlying, disease-driving processes that are responsible for a patient’s clinical course. This measurement approach enables drug developers to know early on if their investigational therapies have genuine disease-modifying effects that allow neurons to recover.”
Dr. Patrizia Fanara, PhD, Vice President of Neuroscience at KineMed and lead scientist involved in The Michael J. Fox Foundation funded research, commented, “The only way to know that you are working towards truly disease-modifying blockbuster interventions, rather than symptom alleviating palliatives, is to track therapeutic effects on the causal pathways. Our compelling axonal transport data, using samples from human cerebrospinal fluid, puts into the hands of scientists and doctors a tool to measure the impact of treatments for Parkinson’s disease. In the future we will be able to identify specific biomarkers, as companion diagnostics for emerging personalized medicines that will provide a window into Parkinson’s disease and identify responders.”
Dr. Marc Hellerstein, MD, PhD, Chief of the Scientific Advisory Board of KineMed, Professor (Calloway Chair) at the University of California, Berkeley, and Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, noted, “This work represents a tremendously promising clinical application of the proteome dynamics technology that KineMed has been developing. The capacity to measure the metabolic biology of protein cargo molecules in the living human brain had not previously been possible. This technology has the potential to transform the clinical monitoring of Parkinson’s patients, as well as other diseases.”
KineMed is interested in collaborating with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies for the advancement of disease‐modifying drugs in development for Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders. KineMed’s proprietary kinetic biomarker platform predicts how a compound will perform, assisting in focusing efforts on future successful compounds earlier and redirecting efforts away from drugs that are likely to fail in longer, more expensive, later-phase clinical trials.
About KineMed, Inc.
KineMed, based in Emeryville, California, is a world-leading specialist in the identification and measurement of the dynamic biochemical processes that cause disease. KineMed’s core, patented, proteome dynamics technology platform, combined with deep biological expertise, accelerates and lowers the cost of diagnostic and therapeutic R&D.
The ability to monitor and control the dynamic behavior of networks, rather than isolated targets, is the next great challenge in therapeutics. KineMed’s patented mass spectrometric technologies measure molecular fluxes in living tissues through the complex molecular and cellular networks that are responsible for disease.
KineMed’s innovations have pioneered new fields, including Proteome Dynamics and In Situ Kinetic Histochemistry. Measuring changes in the dynamics of hundreds of proteins, for example, enables diagnosis and monitoring of cardiovascular, neurodegenerative, metabolic and other disorders from a drop of blood. Displaying spatial organization of metabolic fluxes in histopathologic specimens provides functional signatures of disease.
KineMed’s established programs with premier pharmaceutical collaborators address critical challenges facing drug discovery:
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Focus on causes rather than symptoms: Generating pivotal
knowledge for developing blockbuster drugs, by targeting underlying
biochemical causes
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Systems biology approach: Insight into intact living
systems, rather than simplified models, ensures that drug effects are
understood in their intended biological context
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Reduce late-stage attrition: Early, decision-relevant
metrics of drug activity separate winners from losers and reduce later
failures to improve the NPV of R&D spend
- Powerful assays of disease state: Custom-developed assays create companion diagnostic tests for personalized medicine
KineMed is seeking broad collaborations with pharmaceutical, CRO, histopathology, diagnostics, medical instruments and biotechnology partners.
About The Michael J. Fox Foundation (MJFF) Partnership Program
The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research is dedicated to finding a cure for Parkinson's disease through an aggressively funded research agenda and to ensuring the development of improved therapies for those living with Parkinson's today. Established by actor Michael J. Fox in 2000, the Foundation has since become the largest private funder of Parkinson's disease research in the world, investing over $285 million in research, over $74 million of which has been directed to more than 150 unique projects led by industry partners.
Several MJFF awardees have announced follow-on funding deals with “big pharma” and venture capital firms, validating the Foundation’s approach of early investment at the pre-clinical research stage to catalyze investment in PD drug development, which in turn can accelerate promising targets to the clinic. The Partnering Program is designed to help establish more of these productive relationships.
To find out more about the MJFF Partnership Program, please contact the MJFF Research Partnerships team at ResearchPartnerships@michaeljfox.org or visit http://www.michaeljfox.org/research_opportunitiesForIndustry_partnering.cfm