News Life Sciences VAI, MSU project holds promise for speeding Parkinson’s treatment to market
VAI, MSU project holds promise for speeding Parkinson’s treatment to market
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By Joe Boomgaard | LabWork
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GRAND RAPIDS — When Van Andel Institute and Michigan State University College of Human Medicine announced they would be collaborating on projects as part of VAI’s phase II expansion, they had in mind that the two research organizations might find synergies that would benefit each other on new projects. Those sorts of collaborations are already starting to bear fruit, just over a year into the collaboration.
The Van Andel Research Institute, along with its partner TGen, and the MSU College of Human Medicine recently received a $400,000 grant from the Michael J. Fox Foundation to further research on whether repurposing a certain drug for an off-label use might be able to not only help alleviate symptoms for Parkinson’s disease patients, but also to stop the disease from causing further damage.
Jeffrey P. MacKeigan, Ph.D., head of VARI’s laboratory of systems biology and co-investigator of the project, told LabWork that all of the existing Parkinson’s drugs simply help patients deal with symptoms of the disease.
The research project is building off 2009 findings from TGen and Arizona State University that the drug Fasudil, originally used for treating various cardiovascular diseases, has some potential to treat Alzheimer’s disease. The potential connection to Parkinson’s disease was discovered by MacKeigan’s lab.
“It’s really been our collaboration with MSU that has driven the research and the pace at which we’re moving. Everyone brings a core expertise,” he said. “This is one of the more high-profile (research projects at VARI). There’s lots of activity going on, but I’d put it up there as a major accomplishment with a chance to improve the treatment of people with Parkinson’s. It’s the critical mass from VAI and MSU that has pushed us over. We’ve crossed a threshold of really making an impact for patients.”
The Fox Foundation grant the partners received targeted high-risk research that had the potential for quick results. Caryl E. Sortwell, Ph.D., professor at MSU in the division of translational science and molecular medicine and a co-investigator on the project, said the foundation is “very proactive in defining critical areas of research that will move things forward.”
“There’s a paradigm shift we’re in the middle of experiencing,” Sortwell told LabWork. “There’s a giant library of drugs that have been developed for various diseases that didn’t pan out. Their toxicity is safe, but they just did not treat the disorder. (The shift now is to) go back and rescreen the drugs (for other disorders). Even if 10 percent are useful for a disorder, that will make things come to the bedside all that more quickly.”
If researchers were to start from scratch in trying to identify and bring to market an entirely new drug, MacKeigan estimated it would take about a decade to develop and fully test the new molecule. But repurposing a drug that’s already been approved and tested to be safe for humans could take two to three years in this case, he said.
“It meets one of our underlined themes to help patients now. And for a pharmaceutical company, it provides them more value for their molecule,” he said.
But to hit that aggressive two or three year mark, the team has to meet a series of three milestones in their study, including:
- showing that the drug can get to the right places in the brain when taken orally
- demonstrating in clinical models how the drug works with existing Parkinson’s treatments
- and showing in animal models that the drug can stop or reverse the disease.
“We’ll know in a year from now if we’re onto something,” MacKeigan said.
If all goes as planned, he envisions a need for further rounds of funding, as well as the possibility that the research will lead to spin-off companies that could develop new, more effective formulations based on the molecule.
“If we continue progress toward this drug, there is a business opportunity to formulate drugs that are based on this molecule, but it also opens up new opportunities,” he said. “It fuels new drug discovery activity around the disease, the drug and the molecule.”
Sortwell hopes this collaboration is a harbinger of many future partnerships to come between the two organizations.
“Part of the reason we relocated to the Grand Rapids area was the potential for collaborations,” she said. “We’ve only been here for a year as a team, and within our first year, an outside funding agency has already recognized us.” LW
