The Michael J. Fox Foundation (MJFF) has launched four new funding programs focused on driving forward research toward transformative treatments and a cure for Parkinson's disease (PD).

The new funding opportunities are open to both academic and industry researchers. Projects should promote PD drug development around the most promising therapeutic pathways and targets, including leading genetic targets alpha-synuclein and LRRK2.

Researchers can also apply for access to MJFF's growing inventory of tissue samples from pre-clinical models and clinical populations for projects seeking to address promising Parkinson's ideas.

The programs include:

• MJFF Biosample and Tissue Resource RFA, Fall 2013 — MJFF has supported several pre-clinical and clinical efforts to generate valuable biospecimen tissue resources for the research community. This is an opportunity for researchers to apply to use these samples.
• LRRK2 Pharmacodynamic Assays 2013 — MJFF seeks to support projects to identify, generate and validate measures and assays of the function of the protein leucine-rich repeat kinase 2 (LRRK2) that accelerate development and testing of LRRK2-targeted therapies for PD. Successful applicants will be granted membership in the MJFF LRRK2 Consortium, where they can share information, data and resources with awardees of this and other LRRK2-related efforts.
• Therapeutic Pipeline Program, Fall 2013 —  The goal of the Therapeutic Pipeline Program is to support therapeutic development around targets within pathways that have been implicated in altering the course of PD. Proposals may seek support of key steps along the entire therapeutic pipeline, including therapeutic screening, identification and optimization, pre-clinical in vivo testing and clinical testing.
• Synuclein Therapeutic Acceleration Program , SynTAP 2013 — MJFF seeks to aggressively move therapeutic compounds and biologics targeting alpha-synuclein into clinical testing by funding mid to late-stage pre-clinical development work. Studies should be designed to obtain data required for Investigational New Drug application submission, and for future clinical testing of the therapeutic.

In addition to the four launching programs, four other rolling programs are currently open and accepting applications.  To apply for funding, visit https://www.michaeljfox.org/research/apply-for-grant.html.