Parkinson's disease affects more than six million people worldwide. Despite years of research and advances in treatment, the factors that drive the onset of this disorder are still unknown. In most cases, when it is detected ---through the patient's medical history, a physical exam, and brain scans---, it is already too late to reverse the damage. Now, Grifols is initiating a pioneering study to "go back in time and look for the first signs, even before symptoms appear," according to Dr. Jörg Schüttrumpf, head of scientific innovation at the pharmaceutical company.
Parkinson's appears when brain cells that produce dopamine, a chemical that coordinates movement, die or stop working. The goal of Grifols' Chronos-PD study is to be able to detect the disease early through plasma samples from the same people collected over ten years. From these samples, the goal is to detect signals known as biomarkers by analyzing the differences between people who have developed the disease and those who have not.
To carry out this research, the pharmaceutical company has received a donation of 21 million dollars from the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research (MJFF), an entity that the Canadian actor known for his role in Back to the Future founded when he was prematurely diagnosed with this disease at age 29. This alliance comes just days after the Catalan company was awarded a contract with the Ministry of Health for the supply of plasma-derived medicines worth an estimated more than 281 million euros, beating out the Swiss company Octopharma.
From the pharmaceutical company, Schüttrumpf has assured that this study "has the potential to revolutionize disease management," because not only could it be detected early, but the results could be applied to create innovative treatments. In addition, the results of the analysis could even be applied to other diseases, as Grifols has a repository of more than 100 million plasma samples collected over almost 15 years. This is one of the largest banks in the world, and contains plasma samples from thousands of different disease states and, therefore, the results could potentially also be applied to other pathologies, beyond Parkinson's.