Our mission is to combine data and resources to aid discovery of novel treatments for Parkinson’s disease.

The Accelerating Medicines Partnership® (AMP®) Program Parkinson’s disease (AMP PD) is a public-private partnership among NIH and private sector organizations. Managed by the Foundation for the NIH, this partnership aims to identify and validate biomarkers for diagnostic, prognostic and/or disease progression biomarkers for PD and, to provide new tools for use in clinical trials thereby accelerating the development of novel therapies.

Goals
  • Standardizing data collection for biomarkers in multiple cohorts.

  • Conducting standardized assays on thousands of existing biosamples, incorporating existing clinical, imaging, genetic data.

  • Pursuing additional large-scale biomarker discovery with transcriptomics, epigenomics, whole genome sequencing, metabolomics, and proteomics.

  • Dissecting new targets and disease subtypes; track and predict disease progression; identify biomarkers of Parkinson’s progression and assess their potential as targets for therapies.

No Approved Therapies

In the United States alone, it is estimated that more than 1 million people live with PD and approximately 60,000 Americans are diagnosed with the disease each year. Although PD is a complex neurodegenerative disorder, the two primary pathological hallmarks of PD are death of dopamine neurons in a specific area of the brain called the substantia nigra and buildup within neurons of a protein, called alpha synuclein, into clusters called Lewy bodies. PD has been linked to several genetic, epigenetic and environmental factors; however, exact causes of neuronal death and Lewy body formation remain unknown. Despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent on research and development, no disease-modifying drugs have been approved for PD. Data from current PD studies remains siloed behind independent access mechanisms, with no centralized harmonized dataset – limiting the ability to conduct cross-study analyses required to develop deeper mechanistic understanding of disease drivers to be targeted by novel therapies in trials.

Identifying & Validating New Biomarkers

Success of clinical trials aimed at developing new treatments for PD hinges on identifying and validating biomarkers for application in clinical trials. A wealth of information has been collected from individuals with PD through such programs as the NINDS’s Parkinson’s Disease Biomarkers Program (PDBP) the Michael J. Fox Foundation (MJFF)’s Parkinson’s disease Progression Biomarker Initiative (PPMI), the MJFF/NINDS BioFIND cohort and the Harvard Biomarkers Study (HBS). However, the prohibitive time, cost and resources required to perform a large-scale analysis of data from these programs have prevented individual researchers, companies, and organizations from fully leveraging these datasets. As a public-private partnership, AMP PD will provide expertise and resources needed to determine which biomarkers show the greatest potential for predicting PD and the progression of the disease.

Partners

Private Sector Partners
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Public Sector Partners
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Data Portals

AMP Knowledge Portal and Platform

Industry partner Verily (Alphabet Inc.’s research organization dedicated to the study of life sciences) has created the AMP PD Knowledge Portal and Platform, a cloud-based platform that houses harmonized multi-omic data from thousands of PD study participants and healthy controls, derived from biospecimen samples previously collected. These data and analyses are available to all AMP PD partner organizations and to the broader research community. AMP PD researchers are collaborating to identify the most promising biomarkers for use in clinical trials for new treatments to affect the progression of PD.

The introductory webinar “Getting Started with the Accelerating Medicines Partnership program for Parkinson’s Disease (AMP PD) Knowledge Platform” is now available for viewing on YouTube.

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