Combination Therapy for Parkinson's Disease

There are no medications that can reverse or even slow down Parkinson’s Disease (PD) progression and the existing medications can only help motor symptoms while the disease advances. Many previously studied medications showed good results in preserving dopaminergic neurons in preclinical studies but failed to show any neuroprotection in many long, expensive clinical trials. The reasons for this include the diversity of the simultaneously occurring processes leading to neurodegeneration which cannot be addressed with just one medication. Various combinations of potentially neuroprotective medications targeting different disease mechanisms simultaneously may however show improved synergistic efficacy in slowing down Parkinson’s Disease progression.

In order to simultaneously target multiple processes that comprise the neurodegenerative cascade in Parkinson’s Disease (PD) which cannot be addressed with just one medication, we screened 31 different combinations of 9 preselected existing medications chosen for different mechanisms of their action against neurodegeneration to evaluate for additive or synergistic neuroprotective effects on a human dopaminergic neuron cell line from PD patients to select the most effective drug combination.

This combination approach can produce additive or synergistic effect needed to exhibit long awaited clinical efficacy in human trials and eventually help every single patient suffering from this devastating disease. This project, therefore, can lead to clinical development of the first treatment for Parkinson’s Disease which can slow down or reverse its progression.

We identified 3 combinations showing promising additive effects on growth of dopamine brain cells and on reduction of inflammation in brain cells. A paper describing these findings was recently published:

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3921/14/4/396.

Now, we need to re-test these 3 promising combinations of existing drugs using various stem cells models of PD to select the best one to be tested in animal models and subsequent clinical trials.