OUR JOURNEY ON THE ROAD TO THE CURE OF PARKINSON'S

It has been a long and slow journey to develop a curative treatment for Parkinson’s disease, which was discovered nearly 200 years ago.

Billions of dollars have been spent in research and discovery by government and private organizations but without any success. One of the main reasons for this colossal failure to develop diagnostics and therapeutics for diseases of the Central Nervous System (CNS) is the inability of the scientific and medical community to develop technology to deliver drugs across the Blood-Brain Barrier (BBB) into the Central Nervous System. No matter how therapeutically effective the drug is in laboratory experiments but if it cannot reach the Central Nervous System, it ends up being discarded or not pursued. The Blood-Brain Barrier is a physical barrier in the brain that shields the Central Nervous System from any harmful substances (viruses, bacteria, toxins, etc.) in the blood. The same physical barrier becomes a major obstacle in diagnosing and treating brain diseases such as PD because the protective action of the Blood-Brain Barrier excludes most drugs from entering the Central Nervous System.

Needless to say that for developing a curative treatment for brain diseases, a drug must cross the Blood-Brain Barrier and reach the Central Nervous System, find its target with precision and neutralize it. The most explored/tested approach is the development and use of small molecule drugs which can easily cross the Blood-Brain Barrier. Recently, there has been a couple of very encouraging reports about small molecule drugs for treating Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases in animal models. Unfortunately, not only do these small molecule drugs, in general, stop working after a while, they also often have nonspecific biodistribution leading to unbearable toxic effects, in addition to low therapeutic indices and development of drug resistance shortly after the initial treatment, thus reducing the therapeutic efficacy even further. That is why most patients suffering from neurodegenerative diseases have to struggle with finding the right medicine for their condition but such a medicine does not exist so far.

A small biotech company in San Diego has come one step closer to developing diagnostics and curative therapeutics for neurodegenerative diseases. This company has developed a novel class of miniaturized highly specific antibodies, known as “Pico-antibodies”, with remarkable ability to breach the hitherto impermeable Blood-Brain Barrier, which so far has been a global medical problem in the way of curative treatment for brain diseases. Antibodies are molecules with unsurpassed specificity than any other molecules, including small molecules published recently. However, the problem with the conventional antibodies is that they have very poor Blood-Brain Barrier permeability. The miniaturized antibodies developed by the San Diego based Biotech Company have been demonstrated to cross the Blood-Brain Barrier and bound with great precision to intended Alzheimer’s targets in transgenic mice models, thus alleviating toxicity concerns associated with small molecule drugs. Now they have developed similar drugs for Parkinson’s disease, which will start undergoing rigorous testing in PD-like transgenic mice by a doctor at UCSD, a world renowned neuroscientist.

As the founder and moving force behind PRO for twenty-two years, Jo Rosen is working toward making this the first PATIENT DRIVEN research in the world. Jo’s personal mission to raise funds for this exciting new research in hopes of achieving human clinical trials for a possible cure is strong. You are invited to contact Jo Rosen personally to further discuss the details of this project, answer your questions and, hopefully inspire you to join her in funding this scientific research. The company doing the research is a for-profit company founded and run by scientific entrepreneurs.