TAU Parkinson’s Finding Could Lead to Breakthrough Drug
Under a new, exclusive agreement, international pharmaceutical company Dexcel Pharma Technologies Ltd. will develop and commercialize a cutting-edge treatment for Parkinson’s disease invented and developed at Tel Aviv University.
The novel treatment actually modifies the disease’s development, with the potential to stop its progression, as opposed to current drugs that are only able to treat its symptoms. Parkinson’s leads to the brain’s inability to control the body’s movements and is projected to affect upwards of 6 million people worldwide by 2022.
The new TAU technology prevents the build-up of tiny nano-clusters in the brain made of alpha-synuclein proteins, a major characteristic of Parkinson’s. It was developed by Dr. Ronit Shaltiel-Karyo and Prof. Ehud Gazit, the Head of TAU’s Blavatnik Center for Drug Discovery. Prof. Gazit is a member of the Sagol School of Neuroscience and is a faculty member in TAU’s Department of Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology at the George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences and affiliated member in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Iby and Aladar Fleischman Faculty of Engineering. Research at the Gazit lab focuses on the study of biomolecular self-assembly and nano-science, and Shaltiel-Karyo's PhD thesis provided the background for the development of this treatment.
Ramot CEO Mr. Shlomo Nimrodi praised the new agreement with Dexcel, which is headquartered in Israel and has about 1,000 employees worldwide, saying that the treatment “promises to benefit millions of Parkinson’s sufferers worldwide."