Drug repurposing for Parkinson’s – No Silver Bullet 4 Parkinson’s webinar
No Silver Bullet 4 Parkinson’s is an organisation created by people with Parkinson’s with the goal of sharing Parkinson’s expertise with the larger community. The topic of this webinar is ‘Drug repurposing for Parkinson’s’ and presenting is Cure Parkinson’s funded researcher Dr Lorraine Kalia from the University Health Network in Toronto.
Dr Kalia’s research focuses on investigating the mechanisms behind dopamine neuron (nerve cell) loss in Parkinson’s and identifying therapies, in particular repurposed drugs, to target this.
Watch a recording of the webinar here.
Cure Parkinson’s has long supported the repurposing of drugs to act as disease-modifying agents for Parkinson’s. Our International Linked Clinical Trials (iLCT) committee was originally created in 2012 to help evaluate and prioritise existing drugs for further study in Parkinson’s. Repurposed drugs offer a unique advantage because they tend to already have extensive safety data and clinical evidence from other diseases. This means that they can be accelerated into clinical trials involving people with Parkinson’s, speeding up the process of identifying new treatments. Cure Parkinson’s funded a number of trials involving repurposed drugs, including the recently completed phase 2 trial of the liver disease treatment ursodeoxycholic acid (UDCA) and the ongoing phase 3 trial of the Type 2 diabetes drug exenatide.
In 2022, rifabutin, an antibiotic, was prioritised by the iLCT committee for its potential to target build-ups of the protein alpha-synuclein in the dopamine neurons of people with Parkinson’s. The accumulation of alpha-synuclein is a common feature and a possible driver of disease progression. Dr Kalia is currently leading a Cure Parkinson’s funded preclinical project investigating how rifabutin achieves this effect.
No Silver Bullet 4 Parkinson’s regularly hosts webinars with Parkinson’s experts from around the world. If you are interested but unable to attend, or if you would like to watch any of their past sessions, all recordings are uploaded to their YouTube channel.
