Ceregene Receives Additional Grant From Michael J. Fox Foundation to Expand Long-Term Testing of CERE-120 Patients

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SAN DIEGO, Aug. 5 /PRNewswire/ -- Ceregene, Inc. today announced that the Michael J. Fox Foundation will provide partial funds for long-term follow-up testing of patients enrolled in the company's Phase 2 trial of CERE-120 for Parkinson's disease. The funding will enable Ceregene to collect and analyze more extensive data for up to 48 months from patients with advanced Parkinson's disease who were enrolled in the double-blind, controlled trial which ended in November 2008.

As was previously announced, the Phase 2 trial of CERE-120 involving 52 patients, failed to demonstrate a difference in the primary endpoint between patients in the CERE-120 versus control group. It was subsequently announced, however, that CERE-120 suggested improvement on several secondary endpoints at 12 months, and at 18 months, a statistically significant treatment effect on the primary endpoint emerged, while several additional secondary endpoints also showed improvement. In contrast, on no measure did sham patients perform better than CERE-120 patients, at either 12 or 18 months. Based on those findings, and insight gained from analyses of post-mortem brain tissue from two CERE-120 treated patients, the company has revised the dosing regimen and expects to initiate a new trial of CERE-120 in the near future.

Eye movements of Parkinson’s disease patients during sentence comprehension support subcortical role in processing syntax

ScienceDaily (Aug. 4, 2009)
http://www.news-medical.net/news/200...ng-syntax.aspx

The study of the neural basis of language has largely focused on regions in the cortex - the outer brain layers thought by many researchers to have expanded during human evolution.

Research at Brown University's Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, reported in the September Issue of Cortex, published by Elsevier, adds to evidence that deeper, subcortical regions are also critical by pinpointing when Parkinson's disease patients have difficulty while processing grammatically complex sentences. In Parkinson's disease, degeneration of subcortical dopamine-secreting neurons leads not only to motor symptoms but often also to cognitive deficits.