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.  

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.

This is just one of the ways in which Atuka is different from traditional CROs, with successful collaborations across a broad range of partner organizations, including:

• Small biotechs (Kannalife) 
• Academic institutions (Yale, Harvard, MIT, UCSF, UHN) 
• Major pharmaceutical companies (AZ, Pfizer, Merck) 
• Advocacy groups and patient foundations (MJFF, CPT) 
• Independent researchers and early-stage startups (Sea Pharma)

Of course, not all grant submissions are initially successful. In many cases we have helped our partners refine subsequent versions of their proposals to overcome reviewers’ objections. And our assistance can extend beyond the proposals themselves; as many granting programs require matching industry funding. On several occasions, when a project has aligned with Atuka’s mission, we have given the additional support necessary to secure the grant, or provided collaborators with tissue, or included additional endpoints in studies, at no additional cost.

Whether you’re an academic researcher, leader in pharma or biotech, VC funder, or patient advocate, if you’re interested in developing a therapy for Parkinson’s please reach out to us. Even if it’s only an exploratory conversation, this is where true collaboration begins.