Study Rationale:
There are not yet medicines that can prevent or slow Parkinson’s disease. Developing a new therapeutic can cost up to 2.6 billion dollars and takes many years of screening, chemistry and preclinical testing before even reaching human studies. Repurposing is a promising approach to review drugs already developed and with well-known safety profiles in other conditions for their impact on Parkinson’s disease.
Hypothesis:
Virtual drug screening in a database from the Norwegian population will identify existing drugs that could be tested for impact on Parkinson’s disease.
Study Design:
We will screen all drugs registered in the nationwide Norwegian prescription database, which includes comprehensive information about 600 million prescriptions for all 4.6 million Norwegians since 2004. We will evaluate whether use of any of these drugs is associated with an increased or decreased risk of developing Parkinson’s during 15 years of follow-up. We will then confirm risk associations for significant drugs using dose-response, time-lag and sensitivity analyses. Our preliminary data show the feasibility of this approach as we associated beta 2-adrenoreceptor agonists with reduced risk of Parkinson’s disease.
Impact on Diagnosis/Treatment of Parkinson’s Disease:
We will discover and confirm candidate drugs with a known safety profile that can be repurposed and developed for treating Parkinson’s disease.
Next Steps for Development:
In future steps we will replicate associations in another cohort and dissect the mechanism by which these novel drug candidates modulate Parkinson’s-linked pathways.