Berg Pharma and the Parkinson's Institute ink R&D collaboration to drive disease understanding and accelerate therapeutic and diagnostic development in Parkinson's Disease

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• Publié par: berg-pharma-inc
• Nombre de lectures: 40
• Langue: English

Extrait

Berg Pharma and the Parkinson's Institute ink

R&D collaboration to drive disease

understanding and accelerate therapeutic and

diagnostic development in Parkinson's Disease

PR Newswire

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts and SUNNYVALE, California, June 25, 2012

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts

and

SUNNYVALE, California

,

June 25, 2012

/PRNewswire/ -- Berg Pharma, a

Boston

-based pharmaceutical company and

the renowned Parkinson's Institute announced a unique partnership that would

enable a more robust modeling in the investigation of Parkinson's Disease (PD).

There are approximately one million Americans who live with the disease with

50,000 new cases per year and this rate is expected to rise with an aging baby

boomer population. The underlying pathophysiology and disease understanding

of PD still remains elusive due to a combination of disease complexity and lack

of predictive capability of existing models.

Dr. William Langston,

Founder, Scientific Director, and CEO

of the Parkinson's

Institute said, "We believe that with the in depth knowledge of Parkinson's

disease we have at the Institute and the exciting new Berg

Interrogative Biology

platform, there is a real possibility that we accelerate our mission of finding the

cause and cure for the disease, for these reasons we are very excited about

this collaboration."

The hallmark discovery of the association of MPTP and parkinsonism in 1982 by

Dr. William Langston, an internationally renowned neurology researcher and

advisor to the Michael J. Fox Foundation, opened the field up to research and

today leads the Institute that houses a strong clinical and research capability.

Niven R. Narain,

Co-founder, President, and CTO

of Berg Pharma commented,

"The opportunity to collaborate with a giant such as Dr. Langston and gain the

years of expertise, clinical insight, and collaborative research combined with

the power of

Interrogative Biology®

should unravel key insight into this

unrelenting illness and allow for enhanced clinical management and first-in-

class diagnostics and prognostics."

The Berg

Interrogative Biology®

discovery platform has demonstrated a

unique capability in producing drug targets and biomarkers that truly represent

a disease phenotype. It has been able to catalyze molecules now in late stage

clinical trials in cancer and many pre-clinical candidate therapeutics and

biomarkers in endocrinology and CNS diseases. The platform is able to

decipher normal versus disease signatures by integration of data sets from the

genome, metabolome, proteome, and lipidome in an agnostic manner that is

subjected to Bayesian AI informatics. The resulting nodes are then put back

into wet-lab validation before proceeding to proof-of-principle pre-clinical

testing for diagnostic or therapeutic development.

Eric J. Nestler, M.D., Ph.D.,

Nash Professor and Chairman, Department of

Neuroscience and Director of the Friedman Brain Institute

at The Mount Sinai

School of Medicine in

New York

said, "This new collaboration holds tremendous

promise for our understanding and treatment of Parkinson's Disease. Berg

Pharma's uniquely broad capability to explore biochemical abnormalities,

coupled with the Parkinson's Institute's repository of tissues from patients with

this syndrome, should result in fundamental advances in our ability to diagnose

Parkinson's Disease as well as to treat its underlying causes. This is a very

exciting new partnership."

Berg Pharma will gain access to a gold mine of clinically annotated tissue

samples that represent various types of PD samples and specific mutations

such as the LRKK2 mutation which Dr. Birgitt Schuele,

Assistant Professor

, has

collected over the last seven years who will co-lead the collaboration with Berg

CNS Disease Program Leader

, Paula P. Perez. The Berg team will subject

samples to proprietary protocols in the

Interrogative Biology®

discovery

platform for diagnostic and therapeutic outcome. Financial terms of the

relationship were not released.

About Berg Pharma

Berg Pharma is a

Boston

based pharmaceutical company and parent company

to Berg Biosystems and Berg Diagnostics. Our research focus seeks to

understand how alterations in metabolism relate to disease onset. We have

uncovered key insight into metabolic control factors and namely into underlying

elements in the Warburg Hypothesis. The company has a deep pipeline of

early-stage technologies in CNS diseases and metabolic diseases that

complement its late-stage clinical trial activity in cancer and prevention of

chemotoxicity. Armed with use of the discovery platform that translates

biological output into viable therapeutics and a robust biomarker library,

Berg

Pharma is poised to realize its pursuit of a healthier tomorrow.

About the Parkinson's Institute and Clinical Center

The Parkinson's Institute is a medical research organization focused on finding

the cause(s) and cure for Parkinson's disease, while providing world-class care

to its patients. The Institute has a Basic Research department investigating

genetic basis, bio-chemical and cellular mechanisms of Parkinson's disease. A

large Clinical Research department concentrates its activities on

epidemiological studies of Parkinson's disease patient populations. The

Institute's clinic offers specialized movement disorder neurology treatment as

well as physical, occupational, and speech therapy with a rich patient outreach

and education program.