Thermo Fisher Scientific and the Michael J. Fox Foundation have completed a large-scale protein analysis of a landmark Parkinson’s disease study — and made the data public to speed the search for biomarkers.
Announced August 13, 2026, Thermo analyzed roughly 5,500 research samples from the Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI), the foundation’s flagship study launched in 2010. The proteomic work used the Olink Explore HT platform — a high-throughput method that measures thousands of proteins at once — and the results are now openly available in PPMI’s data repository for researchers worldwide.
The goal
The aim is to find biomarkers that can sort Parkinson’s patients into distinct subtypes, track how the disease progresses, and reveal the biological pathways behind it — the groundwork for earlier diagnosis and more targeted, “precision-medicine” treatments. “This is what the Foundation’s global PPMI study was built to do,” said MJFF’s Samantha Hutten. Thermo’s Yan Zhang noted that “discovery is only the beginning in Parkinson’s research.”
Why it matters
Parkinson’s is diagnosed largely by symptoms, often after significant damage has occurred, and patients vary widely — making one-size-fits-all drug development hard. A rich, public proteomic dataset could help the whole field define the disease by its biology rather than its symptoms, a shift the foundation has been pushing toward. It is a resource, not a treatment, but the kind of foundational work that better therapies are built on.