Collaboration beyond the lab

Collaboration is one of the three core pillars that guide Atuka as an organization. It’s embedded in the way we work internally among our teams, but it also defines how we work externally, with our partners, stakeholders, and the broader Parkinson’s community. That includes doing more to include patients and their priorities in the entire drug discovery and development process.  

Atuka’s commitment to collaboration is not aspirational; it’s demonstrable. Our collaborators aren’t just receiving a report, they’re gaining a thinking partner—one fully invested in their pursuit of novel therapeutics that will improve the lives of patients.  

One of the most obvious examples of our commitment to collaboration is the work we perform to help our partners secure grant funding. We have a long history of working with The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, as well as other funding organizations, in obtaining grants to develop new models of the disease. That often means directly assisting our partners in designing their proposed studies and crafting their applications—from providing expert advice on preclinical development packages and model selection based on the therapeutic mechanism of action, to guiding partners through the entire submission process.

• Over 150 grant applications supported 

• Over $50 million in non-dilutive funding secured

We work with our partners on these funding proposals at no cost, seeing it as a key component of our external collaborations and one of the more impactful ways we can contribute to advances in the broader research community.  For our partners, securing such grants often increases their chances of obtaining non-dilutive funding, while helping to generate robust datasets on which future development decisions can be made.