Shared from parkinsonsnewstoday.com.
A $5 million grant from The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research (MJFF) will help Booster Therapeutics develop therapeutics to improve the body’s ability to clear disease-causing proteins that drive Parkinson’s disease.
The research grant will support studies into small-molecule therapeutics that activate the proteasome, a cellular complex responsible for breaking down damaged or unnecessary proteins, as a strategy to treat neurodegenerative diseases. The goal is to find a promising drug candidate and test it in animals to see if it can be safely used in Phase 1 clinical trials.
“Parkinson’s disease is a disorder of the nervous system that worsens as unwanted proteins build up in the brain over time,” Diogo Feleciano, PhD, Booster’s co-founder and chief scientific officer, said in a company press release. “Proteasome activation has the potential to degrade deviant proteins that may be linked to Parkinson’s disease in a systematic fashion.”