Lario Therapeutics awarded $6M for Parkinson's research.
Lario Therapeutics reveals that it has been awarded a $6 million grant from The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research (MJFF). The programme is in collaboration with the Oxford Parkinson’s Disease Centre (OPDC), which will help deliver key sciences as part of the work. Specifically, the OPDC and Professor Richard Wade-Martins will partner with Lario Therapeutics to help evaluate its compounds in patient-derived stem cell models of Parkinson’s disease.
Tom Otis, PhD, Professor of Neuroscience at UCL and Chief Scientific Officer of Lario Therapeutics, said: “We are grateful to MJFF for their funding support for Lario’s efforts to test and develop a potential new therapy designed to prevent the loss of neurons that causes Parkinson’s disease. If our research is successful, this will represent an important new treatment option for patients.”
Henning Steinhagen, PhD, Co-Founder and CEO of Lario Therapeutics added, “This significant funding from The Michael J. Fox Foundation will aid the work out of our therapeutic pipeline and the work we have achieved so far in advancing research in the field. We would like to thank the MJFF team for their support. This grant will help drive our ambition to progress our Cav2.3 program swiftly towards the clinic, to provide a new, effective treatment option for people with Parkinson’s disease.”
The precision medicines for epileptic and neurological disorders specialist will use the grant to help fund its preclinical programme which is investigating selective CaV2.3 calcium inhibition as a disease-modifying approach to help treat Parkinson’s disease. The programme builds upon the already established research that links calcium channels to pathology of the disease, with preclinical experimental studies detecting that CaV2.3 can have a protective effect against the progression of Parkinson’s disease.
Gaia Skibinski, PhD, Director of Research Programs at MJFF, said, “MJFF is dedicated to funding innovative research, such as the work done at Lario Therapeutics, to develop a pipeline of novel therapies that can improve the lives of people with Parkinson’s disease. We look forward to seeing the results of Lario’s research on CaV2.3 as a novel disease-modifying approach for Parkinson’s.”
Richard Wade-Martins, MA, DPhil, Professor of Molecular Neuroscience, University of Oxford, and Head of the Oxford Parkinson’s Disease Centre, concluded, “I am excited to partner with the team at Lario Therapeutics – having grant funding from MJFF is a testament to the impact this study aims to bring to patients. Our research centre works to understand the development of Parkinson’s, with the ultimate aim of targeting the molecular mechanisms of the disease, to prevent disease onset or to delay progression. We see great potential in the CaV2.3 programme and are very happy to collaborate to study patient stem cell-derived neuronal models as part of the research.”