NYSCF – Robertson Investigator Partners With Novo Nordisk to Produce Therapy For Parkinson’s Disease

NYSCF – Robertson Investigator Malin Parmar, PhD, Professor at Lund University, Sweden, is beginning a collaboration with Novo Nordisk, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, to develop a large-scale cell therapy for Parkinson’s disease.

Dr. Parmar’s lab has spent the last ten years studying the cellular basis of Parkinson’s disease and developing methods for turning stem cells into dopamine neurons—the cells lost in the disease. This new partnership with Novo Nordisk will allow her to scale up the research and development of her stem cell therapy, accelerating its progress to clinical trials. 

“To develop a therapy that can benefit patients all over the world, you need financial resources, expertise in global regulation issues, resources to carry out clinical trials, and an infrastructure that enables large scale development and commercialization,” explains Dr. Parmar. “All of this is available within Novo Nordisk, and we are very happy to have them as a partner in driving our research through to clinical trials.”

Novo Nordisk has recently stepped up their investment in stem cell-based therapies—they are about to begin clinical trials for a type 1 diabetes stem cell treatment and are now expanding their focus to include other diseases such as Parkinson’s disease.

For more information, see the press release from Lund University.