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news.Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, a company focused on RNAi therapeutics, has been awarded a grant from The Michael J Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research.
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The grant was awarded under the foundation’s drug discovery and development program aimed at addressing obstacles that currently impede progress in bringing new Parkinson’s disease therapies to market.
The company will use a process known as RNA interference, or RNAi, to develop a potential treatment for Parkinson’s disease. RNA interference is a naturally occurring mechanism within cells for selectively silencing and regulating specific genes. Since many diseases are caused by the inappropriate activity of specific genes, the ability to silence and regulate such genes selectively through RNAi could provide a means to treat a wide range of human diseases including Parkinson’s.
In the research funded by this grant, Alnylam and scientific collaborators at Mayo Clinic are applying RNA interference (RNAi) technology toward the development of a therapeutic for treatment of Parkinson’s disease using small interfering RNAs, to achieve silencing of alpha-synuclein, a protein whose over-expression has been linked to Parkinson’s disease.