Michael J. Fox’s Foundation Makes Parkinson’s Breakthrough

Emmy award-winning actor Michael J. Fox shocked the world when he announced over 25 years ago that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Since then, he’s devoted his talents to eliminating Parkinson’s in our lifetime.

Researchers with The Michael J. Fox Foundation now have impressive progress to report. They’ve developed a biomarker test to measure the protein alpha synuclein that’s helping to diagnose Parkinson’s with more than 90% accuracy, even proving effective at identifying people who may later develop the disease.

“I think this is going to be a game changer for clinical trials and for patient care in the future,” says Samantha Hutten, Ph.D., a neuroscientist and vice president of translational research at the foundation. “But right now it is really a research tool that can be used to inform research and also how we design clinical trials.”

A positive test, for example, may not be able to tell patients which type of alpha synuclein disease they have, whether it’s Parkinson’s, Lewy body dementia or multiple systems atrophy.

“I think there’s huge excitement around it, particularly about the impact on clinical trials,” says Rebecca Miller, Ph.D., an associate professor at Yale University’s School of Medicine who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2013 at age 38. “We’re all looking for a drug that will really be disease-modifying.”

Hutten tells hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter that the biomarker test is an “all-comers” study, meaning patients can participate if they’ve been diagnosed or have family with Parkinson’s, or have risk factors like loss of sense of smell or REM sleep behavior disorder.

The test comes at a crucial time: the global rate of Parkinson’s has doubled since Fox first revealed his condition.

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