News

nQ Medical and EvergreenHealth are looking for people with early stage Parkinson’s disease to enter a monthlong study of a software tool — known as neuroQWERTY — to help track motor symptoms by monitoring how fingers interact with a computer’s keyboard. The study, expected to start in July, will enroll about 50…

Immune cells in the brain responsible for breaking down the toxic protein clumps, or aggregates, that lead to nerve cell death in Parkinson’s disease join together to form networks to share the burden, a study showed for the first time. These networked cells also share energy-producing mitochondria to help…

The activity of the enzyme glucocerebrosidase, called GCase, is not tied to the risk of developing Parkinson’s, nor linked with the disease’s severity, a new analysis from Israel indicates. “We did not find an association with risk for” the early signs or symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, the researchers wrote,…

Hartford Healthcare has been awarded a Parkinson Voice Project 2021 SPEAK OUT! & LOUD Crowd grant — which the Connecticut healthcare network will use to expand its speech therapy programs. Each clinic awarded one of the more than 200 global SPEAK OUT! & LOUD Crowd grants receives therapy…

A new Phase 2 clinical trial will test the psychedelic painkiller ketamine as a treatment for levodopa-induced dyskinesia in people with Parkinson’s disease. The trial, called KET-LID (NCT04912115), is expected to start enrolling participants this month. The first results are expected by the end of the year. Launched by …

Amprion has announced the commercial rollout of SYNTap Biomarker Test, a laboratory test to accurately detect alpha-synuclein aggregates, a hallmark of various brain diseases, including Parkinson’s disease. Alpha-synuclein, a protein, can misfold and accumulate (aggregate) in toxic clumps called Lewy bodies, leading to the death of nerve…

A Phase 1 trial of AP-472, Appello Pharmaceutical‘s lead investigational therapy to ease levodopa-induced dyskinesia in Parkinson’s disease, has started dosing healthy adults. The study will randomly assign young, middle-aged, and elderly adults to escalating doses of AP-472 or a placebo. It aims to evaluate the therapy’s safety, tolerability, and…

A medical student at the University of Queensland has won a U.S. Parkinson’s Foundation fellowship to investigate new ways to halt chronic brain inflammation and the death of dopamine-producing neurons in Parkinson’s disease. Zhen-Yi Andy Ou was awarded one of 11 fellowships for the project “Targeting novel…

Once-a-day treatment with oral ANVS401 was found to significantly improve motor skills among Parkinson’s disease patients in a Phase 2a clinical trial. Annovis Bio, the company developing ANVS401, is now planning to meet with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to discuss possibly initiating larger Phase 3 studies. “We…

Vanqua Bio has raised $85 million in funding to accelerate the development of its small molecule technology platform for treating neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s disease. Led by Omega Funds, the Series B financing will advance the research of Dimitri Krainc, MD, PhD, of Northwestern University, an…