Participants
Welcome to the NINDS Parkinson's Disease Biomarkers Program (PDBP)
The ultimate goal for the treatment of Parkinson's disease (PD) treatment is to develop disease-modifying treatments that slow, prevent or reverse the underlying disease process. Biomarkers of disease progression will dramatically accelerate PD treatment research because it will allow us to: 1) complete clinical trials for treatment discovery in a shorter timeframe; and 2) make sure that our treatments are actually impacting the biological causes of Parkinson's disease, not just the symptoms.
The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) is launching the Parkinson's Disease Biomarkers Program (PDBP) in order to promote biomarker discovery. These biomarkers are targeted for use in future clinical trials of treatments which will protect the nervous system from the damage done by Parkinson's disease. Such treatments are called "Neuroprotective treatments". Clinical trials to identify these neuroprotective treatments have been unsuccessful to date; we believe that Biomarkers will help us leapfrog into successful neuroprotective treatments for Parkinson's disease.
The NINDS launched the PDBP (Fall 2012) by awarding nine grants to scientists across the United States, totaling over $5 million in the first year (these projects will continue for up to a total of five years). The scientists will work together to apply their broad clinical and research expertise to rapidly develop both laboratory methods for biomarker discovery and a comprehensive set of clinical, imaging data and biosample resources that will be used by these scientists and the broader Parkinson's disease research community, to define biomarkers of PD progression. They also will be developing new tools for Parkinson's disease research including assays that can measure biomarkers and analysis tools that will enable comparisons across different types of data. We are working with other stakeholders in the Parkinson's disease field, including the Michael J. Fox Foundation, in order to assure that our efforts dovetail with and enhance other PD biomarker efforts which are currently underway.
The PDBP will use standardized clinical and laboratory data collection approaches in order to ensure that information can be compared and shared (without revealing anyone's identify). The biological samples collected throughout the course of the PDBP will be stored in a central repository, the NINDS Repository, which will be accessible to scientists studying Parkinson's disease.
