South San Francisco–based Neuron23 has started the first-in-human Phase 1 trial of NEU-723 for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. NEU-723 is a highly potent and selective leucine-rich repeat kinase 2 (LRRK2) inhibitor. This clinical trial will evaluate the safety, tolerability and pharmacokinetics of NEU-723 in healthy volunteers.
A targeted approachThe company has also collaborated with the diagnostics firm Qiagen to develop a companion diagnostic to identify a sub-population of Parkinson’s disease patients likely to respond to LRRK2 inhibitors.
“We wanted to try to narrow the population to those who would benefit and respond,” said Nancy Stagliano, chief executive officer of Neuron23. “So we built a machine learning model that can predict if patients respond to this drug or not.”
Stagliano says the targeted approach is “a big differentiator.” “To our knowledge, no one else has done this in neurodegenerative disease,” she said.
Th…