Parkinson's Disease Therapeutics Pipeline Program

Funding will support projects aimed at:  

• Pre-Clinical: Identifying, validating and/or developing novel pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions through pre-clinical development from early screening to pre-clinical characterization and testing.  

• Clinical: Progressing promising interventions with strong preclinical packages into/through initial clinical assessment exploring pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics, safety/tolerability, or early proof of clinical efficacy. 

MJFF will prioritize proposals with the strongest preclinical-to-clinical translational potential, therapeutic rationale and patient value, fulfilling the following criteria: 

• Selected therapeutic target/pathway or mechanism shows a strong biological rationale to be pursued as a therapeutic target in PD.  

• The proposal emphasizes a translational biomarker development plan (where applicable), including measures to monitor target engagement/modulation, hypothesized mechanism of action and patient enrichment measures that can improve clinical trial design to de-risk further development. 

• The proposal has a patient centered approach incorporating patient voice in the clinical development plan.   

For this round, MJFF will not consider:  

• Applications for target identification, proposing early discovery studies to identify new targets. 

• Applications testing tool compounds or biological manipulations with no viable path for further drug optimization/development.   

The Parkinson’s Disease Therapeutics Pipeline Program works in two stages with the goal of offering applicants frequent chances to propose promising therapeutics: 

1. Applicants may submit a pre-proposal application at any time for initial consideration by MJFF within three weeks from submissions.  

2. Applicants whose pre-proposal is selected for further consideration will be invited to submit a full proposal to one of our upcoming review cycles, at least six weeks from the date of invitation. 

Applicants will be notified of a decision within 3 months of the full proposal submission period. Office hours are available for applicants invited to submit a full proposal to discuss program fit and proposal development.  

NOTE: Applicants are permitted to submit multiple, unique therapeutic pre-proposals but should NOT submit multiple pre-proposals supporting different stages or aspects of the same therapeutic development program. Applicants are also permitted and encouraged to re-submit a revised pre-proposal that addresses prior feedback provided by MJFF, if applicable. 

Watch a video on this funding program that covers our application and review processes.