NEW YORK – Verily, an Alphabet company, said Wednesday that it has received a $14.7 million grant from the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research to create a comprehensive molecular dataset to advance Parkinson's disease research.
Verily will use molecular profiling techniques to generate data to pair with clinical, imaging, and wearables-based behavioral and physiological data already collected over several years through the Personalized Parkinson's Project, a collaboration with Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands. This two-year longitudinal study of 520 Parkinson's patients collected detailed clinical histories, data from the Verily Study Watch, imaging data, and matched biospecimens such as blood and cerebrospinal fluid. Verily said the data will be made available as a public resource to researchers through its Workbench product.
Under the new grant, Verily plans to create one of the most detailed molecular Parkinson's disease datasets using multiple profiling methods. This will include high-resolution immuno-genomic data for research on the immune system's association with Parkinson's disease pathogenesis; whole-genome sequences for consenting patients to enable discovery of genetic factors associated with the disease; and metabolic and α-synuclein data, which have shown promise for assessing and predicting disease activity and stages.
The new work builds on years of collaboration between Verily and MJFF.
"Scientific understanding of Parkinson's disease has advanced significantly over the past decade, and we continue to seek new answers on its genetic, immunological, and molecular determinants," Mark Frasier, chief scientist at MJFF, said in a statement. "The Michael J. Fox Foundation supports a broad portfolio exploring biological forms of Parkinson's disease through molecular phenotyping. As part of those efforts, Verily's new data resource aims to enable researchers to achieve breakthroughs on the underlying mechanisms of the disease and develop novel therapies that can improve the quality of life for people with Parkinson's disease and their caregivers."