NEW YORK – Imperial College London has launched a three-year single-cell research project to study Parkinson’s disease with funding from several pharmaceutical companies and a £4 million ($5.36 million) founding gift from the Gatsby Charitable Foundation.
As part of the project, dubbed Landmark and announced on Monday, researchers at Imperial College London will conduct single-nucleus RNA sequencing on hundreds of tissue samples donated by Parkinson’s patients and their families to the Parkinson’s UK Brain Bank in order to build a gene expression atlas across different cell types implicated in the disease.
The Landmark project aims to understand the biological underpinnings of Parkinson’s in the brain at the cellular and genetic level, according to Imperial. The project will produce datasets that will be made freely and openly available to the global research community.
In addition to the initial funding from Gatsby, Landmark, a public-private partnership, is also supported by Parkinson's UK, Imperial, and pharmaceutical companies GSK, Novartis, Roche, and UCB. Imperial said each pharmaceutical company will contribute to the research costs and will receive early insights into all discoveries that can inform their development of new therapies for Parkinson’s.
Results will also feed directly into Parkinson’s Virtual Biotech, the joint drug development arm of Parkinson’s UK and the Parkinson’s Foundation, to help develop new treatments.
"There is lots of excitement around the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence for drug target discovery. The problem is, without high-quality data, these computational models still end up with the wrong answer," Michael Johnson, a professor at Imperial College who will lead the Landmark project, said in a statement. "Landmark will become a globally important resource, establishing the standardized genomic data at scale that these models require to come up with the right answers."