The Michael J. Fox Foundation (MJFF) announces 70 grants that total $49.7 million awarded in February and March 2025.
These grants support research to improve treatment of Parkinson’s disease (PD) symptoms, visualize the disease with imaging technology, and learn about similarities between PD and other neurodegenerative diseases. Find more on MJFF Funded Studies here.
Treating Gait Impairments
Symptoms that affect walking and balance — often referred to collectively as gait impairments — are among the most disruptive to everyday life for people with Parkinson’s. So MJFF is focused on making therapeutic development in this area more productive. Working with patients, researchers and clinicians serving on our Gait Advisors Leading Outcomes for Parkinson’s (GALOP) advisory committee, MJFF made an open call to the research community for novel approaches to treating gait impairments.
Projects funded through the Freezing of Gait Program aim to treat freezing of gait through pharmacological approaches, physical therapy, wearable technology and optimizations to currently available deep brain stimulation. In one, a team led by Moran Gilat, PhD, at KU Leuven, is developing a tool that combines AI and wearable sensors to detect freezing of gait and, ultimately, improve its treatment.
Applications responding to a second open call in this area, for the Personalized Approaches for Understanding, Assessing and Improving Gait in Parkinson’s Disease Research Program, are currently in review.
Subtyping Disease
In 2024, MJFF launched a funding program to support research into PD endotypes. Endotypes are disease subtypes, as defined by distinct biological mechanisms such as specific genetic mutations. By studying the biological mechanisms underlying Parkinson’s (and other synuclein-based diseases), researchers can obtain a clearer understanding of endotypes that help explain why Parkinson’s manifests differently in different people. This work holds promise to refine diagnosis and enable more tailored treatment for PD.
Some of the projects funded through the MJFF’s Neuronal Synuclein Disease Endotypes Program— including one led by Doug Galasko, MD, at the University of California, San Diego, and another by Thomas Beach, MD, PhD, at Banner Health — are exploring the sometimes-overlapping pathology underlying Parkinson’s (alpha-synuclein) and Alzheimer’s (amyloid-beta, tau). Using different approaches, the researchers are studying how this pathology affects cognition and other symptoms, including potential interactions between the diseases.
Brain Imaging Progress
In the past year, the imaging field has seen advances in PD PET imaging, which uses tracers specially designed to interact with a protein target (alpha-synuclein in PD) and reveal information about it on 3D scans. PET imaging holds potential to dramatically transform how Parkinson’s is managed, allowing earlier detection and tracking of the disease progression. It also would allow clinical trials to assess the impact of experimental therapies on the disease.
Today, while challenges remain, researchers supported by MJFF are advancing alpha-synuclein tracers in testing and refining them to make them more useful. As an example, in one MJFF-backed PET imaging project, a team led by Vikram Khurana, MD, PhD, at Mass General Brigham, is working to develop PET tracers that could be used for diagnosing PD and other synuclein-based diseases, such as dementia with Lewy bodies and multiple system atrophy.
We have seen some progress in developing tracers, with three tracers in clinical trials being presented at the ADPD 2025 conference, but each is still in need of refinement with additional opportunities still available for other teams to make important advancements.
A Robust Portfolio
The projects listed here illustrate the broad approach to Parkinson’s research at MJFF, and they only make up a portion of funded research, which extends from individually selected projects to large studies and initiatives, including the Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI) and the Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s Collaborative Research Network (ASAP CRN).
To learn more about active funding mechanisms at MJFF, visit our Funding Opportunities page.