On 7th January 2015 a group of six members of the Edinburgh Research Interest Group visited the start-up company, Parkure.
We met the CEO, Dr Lysimachos Zografos, 32, an Athens-born research associate at the University of Edinburgh, and Professor Douglas Armstrong from the Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation. Parkure is looking to raise a total of £100,000 from crowdfunding to help find a cure for Parkinson’s, which affects an estimated 127,000 people in the UK. It is hoped that additional funds will come from private equity investors.
It will be the first time in Scotland that crowdfunding has been used to help fund drug discovery research, and the first crowdfunding attempt worldwide to find a cure for Parkinson’s disease. Zografos and his team hope to use large numbers of fruit flies to fast track trials with a number of drugs already on the market to treat other diseases. The techniques which they have developed should permit the screening of up to 10,000 compounds in a year. For a brief outline and stunning image, click on this link: Fruit fly brain and for a recent BBC news item click here BBC news
You can read a short summary of our visit by clicking on the following link: parkure_visit