Verily, Alphabet’s health data and AI subsidiary, has been awarded a $14.7 million research grant from the Michael J. Fox Foundation (MJFF) for Parkinson’s research to generate a detailed molecular dataset of the disease.
The effort will integrate advanced molecular profiling with an extensive body of clinical, imaging and wearable data collected through the Personalized Parkinson’s Project (PPP).
The PPP is a two-year longitudinal study conducted in collaboration with Radboud University Medical Center, involving 520 individuals diagnosed with Parkinson’s.
The study has captured multimodal datasets, including biospecimens, clinical histories, imaging scans and physiological data.
Dr. Andrew Trister, chief medical and scientific officer at Verily, told MobiHealthNews that throughout the course of the study, participants wore Verily’s Study Watch continuously and completed virtual motor exams.
“This, combined with imaging and clinical data, has helped to validate the use of digital measures in Parkinson’s research,” he said.
It also provides detailed profiles of participant health and disease progression over time, which can be used to endophenotype disease and improve clinical trial endpoints for treatment development.
“We will use multiple laboratory methods to create the most detailed molecular dataset of a PD cohort to date,” Trister said.
These include Verily’s proprietary Immune Profiler Xseq with 30X Whole Genome Sequencing (for participants who have consented) as well as Cytokine, Metabolomic and Αlpha-synuclein profiling.
The funding will be used to perform high-resolution molecular analysis on the existing biospecimen bank, which includes blood and cerebrospinal fluid samples.
“Our approach to molecular analysis is informed by our experience supporting researchers working on projects such as AMP-PD, which provides a single unified environment for analyzing complex multiomics data from eight cohorts, including data from the MJFF PPMI study,” Trister said.
The resulting dataset will feature whole genome sequencing, metabolomics, alpha-synuclein biomarkers and immunogenomic data. The dataset is expected to support new insights into disease mechanisms, improve diagnostics and facilitate the development of targeted therapies.
These layers aim to improve the understanding of the genetic, metabolic and immune pathways involved in Parkinson’s pathogenesis and progression.
The data will be made publicly accessible to the research community via Verily Workbench, a cloud-based environment for managing and analyzing large-scale biomedical datasets.
Researchers will be able to use the platform to cross-reference and analyze Parkinson’s-related molecular data alongside other Verily hosted datasets.
Trister noted Verily has worked with MJFF across several collaborations, including a partnership in MJFF’s Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI), through which Verily provided its Study Watch for a two-year sub-study focused on generating digital measures data.
Verily’s Workbench also supports MJFF across several programs, including with collaborators such as the Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP) initiative and its resource program the Global Parkinson’s Genetics Program (GP2) and data-sharing tool, the CRN Cloud, with more planned.
“This grant adds a new dimension to past collaborations by providing a novel molecular data resource that will help researchers worldwide better understand the genetic, immunological and molecular characteristics of PD along with diverse data elements that are already available in the PPP dataset,” Trister said.
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