Lario Therapeutics (‘Lario’, or ‘the Company’), a biopharmaceutical company developing first-in-class precision medicines for epileptic and neurological disorders, today announced it has been awarded a $6 million USD grant from The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research (MJFF). The program is in collaboration with the Oxford Parkinson’s Disease Centre, which will also be delivering key science as part of the grant.
The grant will be used to fund Lario’s preclinical program investigating selective CaV2.3 calcium channel inhibition as a novel and disease-modifying approach for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. There is extensive literature linking calcium channels to pathology of the disease, and it has been demonstrated in preclinical experimental studies that the deletion of CaV2.
3 can have a protective effect against Parkinson’s disease progression. Lario is partnering with Professor Richard Wade-Martins and the Oxford Parkinson’s Disease Centre (OPDC) for the study, for the evaluation of Lario compounds in state-of-the-art patient-derived stem cell models of Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson’s disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder occurring when brain cells that make dopamine, which coordinates movement, stop working or die.
Symptoms are lifelong and worsen over time, including motor dysfunction, such as tremors, slowness, stiffness, walking, and balance problems, as well as problems such as depression and memory problems. .