The Aligning Science Across Parkinson's (ASAP) initiative has announced grants totaling $132 million over three years in support of collaborative research to better understand the underlying causes of Parkinson's disease.

Launched in 2019 as a joint project of the Milken Institute Center for Strategic Philanthropy and the Sergey Brin Family Foundation, ASAP supports collaboration, open science, and early data sharing at scale, with a focus on three areas: PD functional genomics, neuro-immune interactions, and circuitry and brain-body interactions. Administered by the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research, the second round of Collaborative Research Network grants will support fourteen cross-institutional research teams studying circuity and brain-body interactions, led by sixty-eight investigators from ten countries.

Recipients include a team led by Michael Kaplitt (Weill Cornell Medicine), which was awarded $8.9 million over three years to study how abnormal protein aggregates may spread from the gut to the brain to drive the early stages of Parkinson's disease; a team led by Thomas Wichmann (Emory University), which will receive $6.3 million to examine which specific cells or connections are involved in abnormal activity and the anatomy of neurons in the brain's outer mantle in PD patients; and Michael Schlossmacher (Ottawa Hospital), which was awarded $9 million to determine whether scent-processing nerves that connect the inside of the nose to the brain play a role in the development of Parkinson disease.

"Parkinson's is a complex disorder that has long evaded attempts to fully reveal its underpinnings and, as such, has stymied attempts to slow or stop disease progression," said Hong-yuan Chu (Van Andel Research Institute), a co-investigator on Wichmann's team. "I am hopeful our mechanistic studies will reveal new insights into the brain circuits impacted by the disease at the cellular and synaptic levels, and provide a path forward for new therapeutic development."

(Photo credit: HealthLine.Com)