The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research (MJFF) issued a grant to Verily, a company focused on health data platforms, to build upon the successes of the Personalized Parkinson's Project (PPP), a large study tracking people with Parkinson’s over time. Building upon this dataset will help with in-depth characterization of Parkinson’s disease (PD) at different stages and supplement other critical sources of knowledge, such as MJFF’s flagship Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI).
The $14.7 million grant from MJFF supports the use of advanced laboratory techniques to examine biospecimen samples collected during the PPP study.
By fleshing out the information about this valuable cohort then publishing it using Verily’s open science platform tools, MJFF aims to create another publicly available dataset to support Parkinson’s research.
Expanding Impact of Personalized Parkinson’s Project
The new initiative will build on data from the PPP, a two-year study of 520 people with Parkinson’s by Verily and Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands, led by Bastiaan R. Bloem, MD, PhD. PPP has collected clinical histories, data from Verily Study Watches (“smart” watches that capture movement), imaging data and biospecimens like blood and cerebrospinal fluid.
The objective is to generate a comprehensive molecular dataset for Parkinson's disease research by producing data that helps with examining the role of the immune system in PD, whole genome sequences to facilitate genetic discoveries related to Parkinson’s and data that supports the development of Parkinson’s biomarkers to predict disease activity and progression.
Developing Datasets for Global Research
Large-scale datasets allow scientists to compare biological and clinical information, highlighting trends and uncovering signatures of Parkinson’s disease for developing and testing treatments more effectively.
The Michael J. Fox Foundation supports many of these data collection efforts, ranging from PPMI to the Global Parkinson’s Genetics Program (GP2). It's important to back a diverse array of these efforts, as each dataset makes the last dataset more valuable by providing additional points of comparison.
The PPP gives the global scientific community another window into how Parkinson’s disease progresses over time, both in a clinical and biological sense. It provides a potential source of novel findings while also creating a new cohort to verify results from other datasets.
Continuing Support for Open Science
The data collected for PPP will be made available to researchers around the world using Verily’s Workbench platform. This platform facilitates data sharing and research for important global projects like the Accelerating Medicines Partnership® Parkinson's Disease program, GP2 and the Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s initiative.
Making the data easily available and navigable is a key commitment of MJFF and is one reason for the Foundation’s continued work with Verily. MJFF initially worked with Verily in 2018 on PPMI, with the company providing smart watches to collect movement data. That relationship has expanded since, leveraging Verily’s Workbench platform to share important datasets.
This grant builds upon the successes of multiple data collection and sharing efforts, moving us closer to understanding new aspects of Parkinson’s disease and developing therapies to treat it.