Originally Posted by girija

Hi All,
I received a reply from Brendan, one of the researchers involved in the study.

Hi Girija,

Thank you for your interest in the intranasal GDNF project. I no longer work on the project; it was the main piece of my doctoral thesis in Dr. Barbara Waszczak's lab. We published the first piece of this work earlier this year, where we tested the intranasal gene therapy approach in rats using Copernicus Therapeutics' nanoparticle technology. See: http://www.nature.com/gt/journal/v21...gt201428a.html.

My part of the GDNF/PD focus of the project had a lot of success in rats, and further experiments are being done by current members of Dr. Waszczak's lab to answer questions raised by the first publication and figure out optimal dosing strategies for the nanoparticle treatments. We hope to publish this data sometime in early 2015.

Making the jump from testing the therapy in rats to humans will always be a very costly and time-consuming process. Once this next paper is out, I believe it will be much easier for Dr. Waszczak's lab (or Copernicus Therapeutics) to gain funding for further testing and eventually clinical trials. Please let me know if you have any other questions!


Best,

Brendan