Every few years, Cure Parkinson’s sets out to review and refresh their research strategy. This document provides the roadmap for how they plan to move closer to their goal: to identify curative treatments for Parkinson’s, with urgency.
As part of this, CurePD have identified four key objectives:
- Grow the treatment selection programme.
The International Linked Clinical Trials (iLCT) initiative, developed in partnership with Van Andel Institute, ensures they are progressing drugs with the most potential for success. They seek to expand this programme by encouraging cross-disease collaborations, evaluating drugs with the potential to help different conditions that share underlying biology.
- Accelerate the clinical testing of new therapies.
Setting up clinical trials is an expensive, time-consuming process. To accelerate this, CurePD have aided in the funding and development of several global multi-arm, multi-stage (MAMS) clinical trial platforms – trials that allow the testing of multiple treatments simultaneously.
- Champion the development of combination therapies.
Parkinson’s is a complex condition with many underlying biological drivers. Therefore, it may be more effective to treat Parkinson’s with combinations of agents that target different aspects of the condition. CurePD are encouraging researchers to explore combination therapies earlier in the drug discovery process, as well as inviting applications for funding.
- Make disease modification more personalised.
Parkinson’s affects each person differently, making it hard to determine the effectiveness of the treatment in a trial. To address this, CurePD are interested in improving patient stratification for clinical trials, helping researchers identify who may benefit from a therapy the most.
This research strategy has been developed with help from individuals within the research community, as well as people living with Parkinson’s. These objectives build-on the work done so far and will help drive us closer to the identification of disease-modifying therapies for Parkinson’s.
