Biotech Company to Partner with Scripps on Parkinson’s Drugs

(Photos8.com)

Envoy Therapeutics Inc., a drug discovery company in Jupiter, Florida says it has begun a research collaboration with The Scripps Research Institute to identify new drugs for Parkinson’s disease that have greater efficacy and safety compared to current therapies. Using funding provided by Envoy, scientists at the two organizations will apply Scripps-Florida’s screening facilities — also in Jupiter — to discover compounds that modulate a target protein discovered by Envoy.

The more than one million people in the United States with Parkinson’s disease show symptoms including muscle rigidity, tremor and a slowing of physical movement. These symptoms are caused by the progressive loss of a subset of dopamine-producing neurons in the basal ganglia, a brain region involved in controlling movement.

Medicines prescribed today for Parkinson’s patients release dopamine to compensate for the decline in naturally produced dopamine. However, patients taking these drugs often experience a gradual loss of efficacy and a number of side-effects, including involuntary movements. The side-effects are thought to be caused by a lack of specificity of the drugs’ actions that affect multiple cell types in the brain.

Envoy says it has developed a technology that enables its researchers to identify a protein that is selectively expressed in a specific cell type in the striatum, an area of the basal ganglia for planning and modulating movement. Envoy’s scientists believe that modulating this protein with a small molecule drug will more precisely affect specific brain cells, achieving the efficacy of current drugs, but without the side-effects.