Greta Hultqvist receiver of the Swedish Parkinson Foundation research grant

Parkinson's disease – one of the neurodegenerative diseases that form the fastest growing cause of death globally – develops when the protein alpha synuclein forms clumps that are toxic to the brain's nerve cells. Despite intensive research, a curative therapy remains to be discovered, but now Greta Hultqvist, researcher with a focus on protein drug design, has presented a new strategy with the potential to stop the disease already at an early stage.

“Creating a curative treatment for Parkinson's disease comes with several challenges. You have to transport the drug past the blood-brain barrier that protects the brain tissue and then bind it to even the smallest and most harmful protein clumps. Now we have developed both a transporter that increases drug absorption in the brain by 100 times as well as an antibody that binds extremely strongly to alpha-synuclein aggregates of all sizes,” says Greta Hultqvist, Associate Professor at the Department of Pharmacy.

In a current call, the Swedish Parkinson Foundation awards Greta Hultqvist SEK 200,000 for her project Novel immunotherapy strategy with BBB penetrating very-high-affinity multivalent alpha synuclein antibody, that has avidity to small oligomers. A study in which the research group will determine how the transporter and the antibody will function together. Already in 2022 and 2023, Hultqvist received the Swedish Parkinson Foundation's equipment grants, totaling SEK 600,000.

“The generous funding we have previously received from the Swedish Parkinson Foundation has been central in creating our laboratory, which in turn is a decisive factor in our progress. The fact that we are now granted the Foundation’s continued trust enables us to take our research into a new phase and to – if everything goes as we hope and expect – lay the foundation for a treatment to put a full stop to the progression of Parkinson's disease.”

text: Magnus Alsne, photo: Mikael Wallerstedt, private