Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP), in partnership with The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research (MJFF), announced $261 million in new grant funding for the Collaborative Research Network (CRN) to map the biological blueprint of Parkinson’s disease and build a standardized toolkit of global research resources that are needed to turn discoveries into treatments. This effort is designed to help researchers better understand what drives the disease and how it can be more effectively treated.
Researchers still do not fully understand why Parkinson’s disease develops or how it progresses, and answering this question is complicated by the wide variation in symptoms, age of onset, and rate of progression between patients. With this latest round of funding, ASAP’s total investment in the CRN since inception is now more than $550 million. This funding sustains the momentum needed to decode the disease’s inherent heterogeneity and accelerate the journey from laboratory breakthrough to clinical application.
Over the past five years, the CRN has reshaped how researchers study Parkinson’s disease by prioritizing team-based collaboration and open science. This approach reflects a new model for scientific research that enables data sharing, coordination, and faster progress across the field. It also supports bold, high-risk scientific ideas needed to tackle complex diseases like Parkinson’s. The program has generated hundreds of research resources, including datasets, code, protocols, and lab materials, which are used by scientists worldwide. Early discoveries from the program have identified promising druggable targets, with work now advancing into pharmaceutical research and clinical development.
This next phase of the initiative’s strategy will deepen understanding of Parkinson’s heterogeneity, capturing the diversity of clinical symptoms, underlying biology, and disease progression. It is a crucial step needed to advance promising findings toward new diagnostics and future precision therapies. Understanding why Parkinson’s develops and progresses differently in each person is a critical step toward developing more targeted and effective treatments for people living with the disease.
“Solving a disease as complex as Parkinson’s requires big bets on bold biological hypotheses,” said Sonya Dumanis, PhD, managing director of ASAP. “We are at an inflection point where new capabilities, from high-resolution imaging to advanced computational modeling, allow us to pose more complex questions about factors like aging and the environment and how they drive the disease. This CRN expansion is designed to funnel innovative ideas into the research and development pipeline while systematically dismantling technical roadblocks. By accounting for the inherent heterogeneity of the disease to validate targets within a human biological context, we are accelerating the development of the next generation of personalized therapies.”
“For people living with Parkinson’s, the need for better treatments has never been more urgent,” said Todd Sherer, PhD, chief mission officer at The Michael J. Fox Foundation. “This level of coordinated, global investment brings together leading scientists to tackle the most critical questions about the disease; not in isolation, but as a connected community working to accelerate discovery and move new ideas into the treatment pipeline.”
In this funding round, each team will receive between $6 million and $9 million over three years, depending on the research theme. This multi-year structure empowers collaborative groups of three to five investigators to combine their expertise and tackle high-priority research questions to shorten the timeline from laboratory insight to clinical application.
Targeting the Next Big Questions in Parkinson’s Disease Research
With the addition of these 32 new awards, ASAP has now funded a cumulative total of 67 CRN teams since its inception. This expansive network encompasses nearly 400 investigators across 187 institutions in 24 countries. New teams will tackle a significant scientific challenge — exploring the heterogeneity of Parkinson’s disease, including when it starts, what symptoms appear, and how quickly it progresses. Teams will:
- Map environmental risk by studying how exposure to pesticides and air pollution interact with genetics to cause and accelerate Parkinson’s disease, using tools like AI-driven molecular fingerprinting.
- Understand co-pathologies by investigating how multiple protein abnormalities commonly associated with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and ALS, including tau, amyloid-beta, and TDP-43, interact with Parkinson’s pathology to drive disease in individual patients.
- Explore aging-related changes to the immune system and genes, and their role in vulnerability to Parkinson’s disease.
- Reveal how brain circuits disrupted by pathological alpha-synuclein contribute to symptoms such as sleep disorders and cognitive dysfunction.
- Characterize the seeding agent driving the alpha-synuclein seeding amplification assay (SAA) — a transformative diagnostic for Parkinson’s disease. By doing so, researchers aim to decode specific disease subtypes and illuminate the systemic biological mechanisms of the disease as it manifests throughout the body.
- Study the brain’s clearance mechanisms to define how these mechanisms’ breakdown contributes to Parkinson’s and uncover new therapeutics.
In addition, several new teams will focus on tool generation, developing novel resources for the research community — including CRISPR-engineered cell lines, viral vectors, and advanced chemical probes — to support continued work on emerging targets identified in previous ASAP awards. By providing these standardized, validated resources to the global community, ASAP is helping remove technical barriers that can slow early-stage research and drug development, while ensuring that researchers everywhere are working from a common, high-quality baseline.
Photocredit: ASAP
