The Michael J. Fox Foundation - Therapeutics Pipeline Program

The Parkinson’s Disease Therapeutics Pipeline Program advances therapeutic development through pre-clinical and/or into clinical testing of approaches addressing unmet needs of people with PD with clear potential to prevent, stop, or delay disease progression or to reduce the burden of daily symptoms. As the requirements for delivering new treatments into the market depend on specialized expertise and resources, a unique goal of this program is to promote clearer paths to commercialization and market access by the PD community. Therefore, we are only accepting applications from industry groups or academic teams working in collaboration with a dedicated industry partner capable of further commercial development of a promising intervention.

MJFF prioritizes pre-clinical and clinical programs that may slow, stop, or prevent disease progression, efforts that address moderate-to-advanced motor or non-motor symptoms of Parkinson’s not well-managed by current treatments such as advanced gait disturbances (e.g., balance issues linked to falls, freezing) and cognitive changes.

For this program, MJFF will not consider proposals focused on the following:

• Applications seeking to identify new intervention targets (e.g., large-scale screening or genomic/transcriptomic analyses).
• Applications seeking to validate a target with only tool compounds or biological manipulations that have no viable path for further drug optimization and development.
• Applications seeking to test reformulation of commercially available drugs via a new route of administration.
• Application seeking to assess efficacy of dietary supplements.

• U.S. and non-U.S. public and private non-profit entities, such as universities, colleges, hospitals, laboratories, units of state and local governments, and eligible agencies of the federal government in collaboration with biotechnology/pharmaceutical/medical device companies, or other publicly or privately held for-profit entities.
• MJFF encourages the inclusion of researchers who span career stages.
• Early career investigators (within 1-7 years of first independent appointment or equivalent) are encouraged to apply and are permitted to serve as Principal Investigator (PI); Post-doctoral fellows are permitted to serve as Co-Principal Investigator (Co-PI). Training and fellowship activities are not supported through this program.

• More information about the program is available here and the full RFA is available here
• Application portal can be found here