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Alchemab Therapeutics has been awarded a grant of $595,000 by The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research (MJFF) to support its Parkinson’s disease program. The grant will fund research performed at Alchemab following its identification of antibodies that target prostaglandin biology in Parkinson’s disease (PD), a potentially unique approach to treatment. Alchemab is researching the therapeutic effects of its resilient patient-derived antibody in PD.
The grant was awarded through MJFF’s Parkinson’s Disease Therapeutics Pipeline Program. The program seeks to advance testing of promising therapeutic developments that address unmet medical needs in people with PD. The program is designed to fund therapeutic development with a clear focus to prevent, stop, or delay disease progression, or to reduce the challenges of daily symptoms.
Alchemab’s antibodies were discovered using its innovative platform which integrates advanced proteomics, bioinformatics, and machine learning in the analysis of patient samples to find signals associated with resilience to disease. Using samples from patients predisposed to PD symptoms and samples from patients with a typical disease course, Alchemab identified a target it believes may contribute to disease resistance. Its research explores how the prostaglandin pathway impacts disease progression, using comprehensive genetic and molecular analyses.
In addition, it is applying its computation resources to mine large PD datasets like the Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI) to identify novel targets.