Montara Therapeutics Inc. has been awarded a research grant of approximately $1 million from The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research (MJFF) to advance a Brainonly therapy targeting mTOR for Parkinson’s disease.

Lysoway Therapeutics Inc. has been awarded an additional research grant from The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research (MJFF) to support development of its TMEM175 agonist program for Parkinson’s disease.

Voyager Therapeutics Inc. has obtained IND clearance from the FDA for VY-1706, the company’s investigational gene therapy for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.

Sharp Therapeutics Corp. has reported new preclinical data supporting its novel therapeutic approach for Niemann-Pick disease type C (NPC).

The FDA has accepted the IND application from Rest Therapeutics SAS for RST-101, the company’s lead investigational candidate for the early treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Recent findings are reshaping current understanding of the post-infection landscape of SARS-CoV-2. Although previous studies had already suggested that autoimmunity might underlie the persistent neurological symptoms seen in long COVID, researchers at Yale University and Mount Sinai now reinforce this hypothesis. SARS-CoV-2 infection appears to trigger an autoimmune mechanism that drives chronic pain, fatigue and cognitive impairment in some patients.

AAV-based therapies for Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) have shown efficacy, but have limitations such as poor delivery to target tissues and toxicity associated with the vector. Gemma Biotherapeutics Inc. has developed a gene therapy candidate, GB-703, which uses a new myotropic, integrin-binding AAV capsid containing a codon-optimized, deimmunized hybrid payload.