EMERYVILLE, Calif.—KineMed Inc., a specialist in theidentification and measurement of the dynamic biochemical processes that causedisease, recently announced that it has been awarded funding by the Michael J.Fox Foundation (MJFF) Industry Partnering Program.
The MJFF sponsored KineMed's recently completedpathway-based biomarker study of neuronal function, which measures differencesin brain neuronal transport function in Parkinson's patients compared tohealthy controls. Using KineMed's proprietary proteome dynamics technology,this research showed, for the first time, abnormalities in biochemical pathwaysin neurons in the living brain that appear to be associated with thepathogenesis and disease progression of Parkinson's disease.
"Our foundation is devoted to developing direct, proactiverelationships with industry, in order to drive advances toward bettertreatments for Parkinson's disease," says Dr. Todd Sherer, CEO of MJFF. "ThePartnering Program encourages select awardees like KineMed to publiclyhighlight their organization, team and projects, providing a formalized processfor encouraging the kind of collaboration needed to make progress."
KineMed President and CEO David Fineman says the companywelcomes new alliances with "pharmaceutical collaborators interested in usingthe cutting-edge techniques that we have brought to bear on the challenge ofParkinson's disease."
"Research over the last decade has revealed this disease tobe much more complex than was thought at first, and we now understand whyearlier generations of drugs that focused on a single metric, such as dopaminelevel, could not provide a cure," Fineman adds. "Just as a physician is able todirectly ask a patient whether he's feeling better, a single cerebrospinalfluid sample allows us to directly query the overall health of living neuronswithin the brain. Our unique ability to sample several pathways simultaneouslynot only detects whether patients have Parkinson's or other neurodegenerativeconditions, but also enables us to monitor progression and therapeutic reversalof underlying, disease-driving processes that are responsible for a patient'sclinical course. This measurement approach enables drug developers to knowearly on if their investigational therapies have genuine disease-modifyingeffects that allow neurons to recover."
Dr. Marc Hellerstein, chief of the scientific advisory boardof KineMed, says this work represents "a tremendously promising clinicalapplication of the proteome dynamics technology that KineMed has beendeveloping."
"The capacity to measure the metabolic biology of proteincargo molecules in the living human brain had not previously been possible.This technology has the potential to transform the clinical monitoring ofParkinson's patients, as well as other diseases," Hellerstein adds.
