A couple of months ago, I received a message on my website. A gentleman who is part of a foundation offered to make a sizable donation to Right Brain Bio. He wanted us to launch our trial of dopamine reduction therapy with RB-190 as quickly as possible.

I was pretty excited until I learned that this foundation was limited by their by-laws to only donate to non-profit [501(c)(3)] organizations. And in order to be a viable entity to raise the funds necessary to get RB-190 to market, Right Brain Bio has to be a for-profit corporation.

This person was persistent. He looked for ways to make it happen. His idea was to work with established non-profits focused on Parkinson's disease to make a directed donation.

His first target was the Parkinson's Foundation. Because our approach is not one that Foundation is taking, they were not able to accommodate the request.

Next, he approached the Michael J. Fox Foundation. Similarly, they were unable to accommodate direct donation requests.

I hate to admit it, but it makes sense for these Foundations not to have a directed donations option. If they did, it would require them to allocate resources and do so in an unpredictable manner. And that is a lot of work that could be very different from where their core resources are focused, making this an inefficient process.

Despite it being rational for both these Foundations to say "no" I will admit I was hoping....

Hot off the press....

In this week's npj | Parkinson's Disease, a study was published that investigated the relationship between the amount of intact dopaminergic neurons axons and the presence of resting tremor. The cause of resting tremor is not well understood. That may be changing.

In medical/health press coverage, the study was reported as though it showed that too much dopamine in the caudate was the cause of resting tremor. While that would be interesting to Right Brain Bio - showing evidence of dopamine excess causing pathology - that is not what the data show.

The data show that resting tremor is more likely when the loss of dopaminergic nerve terminals is not as pronounced in the caudate as in the putamen. These data show that it is the imbalance between the degree of abnormalities in each region that appears to be associated with risk of resting tremor (in people with early/mild PD). This set of observations may prove to be very important in the struggle to treat resting tremor.

In the context of this scientifically exciting report, the coverage in the press allows for the impression that the study showed that too much dopamine is the problem (example).

This is not what the authors of the study report. Look at the article title: "Relative sparing of dopaminergic terminals in the caudate nucleus is a feature of rest tremor in Parkinson’s disease." The authors are not claiming that excess dopamine is the problem, and instead, show that resting tremor is associated with relative sparing of dopaminergic axon loss in the caudate, which is the same as saying there is not as much loss in the caudate as there is in the putamen.

As in most clinical studies, the methods used do not measure how much dopamine is inside the neurons, so would be unable to measure the most important variable representing whether there is too little, the right amount or too much dopamine inside the neurons.

Be cautious about what you read in the lay press about science.