This week, four members of The Michael J. Fox Foundation (MJFF) will be joining more than 30,000 participants at the world’s largest conference on the brain — the Society for Neuroscience’s (SfN) annual meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana. It’s an opportunity for neuroscientists to present novel, unpublished study results, learn from colleagues’ feedback surrounding their work, and network with others within the field who might have the resources or knowledge to help drive their own research forward.
“The Neuroscience meeting offers a unique opportunity for neuroscientists to exchange ideas on the largest of scales,” says Marco Baptista, PhD, associate director of research programs at MJFF.
“Being exposed to a vast collection of unpublished peer work allows researchers to better understand trends across the field, and the one-to-one interactions with fellow scientists that take place often provide insight into one’s own work in the lab. Without conferences like this one, researchers might otherwise wait years for access to data that could speed their own thinking in one direction or another.”
MJFF recognizes the need to bring researchers together at an early stage in its own work — the more scientists who are working together to bring new drugs to market, the better the chance at success.
(To this end, MJFF and the New York Academy of Sciences are co-sponsoring a drug development conference, the only one focused exclusively on PD, this October 24. By getting academics and drug developers in the same place, the Foundation hopes to de-risk industry investment, and encourage decision makers to allocate more and more resources to PD).
Foundation staffers Baptista, Kuldip Dave, PhD and Sonal Das, PhD will be in New Orleans to present on MJFF efforts to address one problem in the field in particular: the need for quality and accessible laboratory tools to develop and test potential drugs. Often, these tools are expensive or altogether unavailable; but MJFF has worked hard to develop critical tools and distribute them at little or no cost to researchers, both in the non-profit and for-profit sectors. MJFF staff will present the Foundation’s strategies and update the research community on available tools that can help accelerate Parkinson’s research and drug development.
“This is a real opportunity for us to communicate that certain tools are now available, and to encourage scientists to use them,” says Dave.
Vice President of Research Programs Brian Fiske, PhD, will also be in New Orleans to speak on a panel on how to communicate research to a different, but equally important, audience: patients and the public.
“At the end of the day, we are beholden to the people that matter the most — those with Parkinson’s and their loved ones,” says Fiske. “This is why we are all here, to drive forward research so that they can have access to new and better treatments. Communicating the science behind the research can be a complex task, but we strive to do the best we can to keep people with PD up-to-date on the latest developments along the drug development pipeline and to provide information that can help them participate and contribute to the research and drug development effort.”
In addition to presenting the Foundation’s approaches to communicating science, Fiske says that he hopes to gain new perspective from his colleagues at SfN, and to bring new ideas back with him to New York that can inform MJFF’s research mission.
For his part, Baptista is hopeful to do some learning of his own:
“I think a great outcome from the conference would be to learn of a new drug target that we hadn’t previously thought of,” he says. “New directions mean new possibilities for new drugs. And the more paths we have to follow, the greater our odds at finding some that lead to better treatments.”