EAN 2026 | Ongoing research into foslevodopa/foscarbidopa in PD treatment

So let’s answer the first part of your question, what I’m very excited about. One of the key things we have now noticed is a massive gap amongst pharmaceutical trials is that these trials, firstly, are performed in a very selected group of patients who are suitable for the trial. And that’s why it may not reflect a real-world population. Secondly, they’re often almost, we’ve reported this, 90% of data that we see in clinical trials are from white caucasian patients. Whereas if you look at the expansion and the projection of Parkinson’s, the highest number of Parkinson’s that’s projected by 2050 are likely to be in many of the developing countries like India, China, South Africa. Some countries are, of course, developed or in the way of being developed, but I’m saying in the non-white population, so to speak. And there’s very, very little data on it. Foslevodopa-foscarbidopa, however, has such data to show that it works in a cross-racial way. So there’s a recent paper called the CRIM-FOS study, which shows clearly that if you compare the foslevodopa-foscarbidopa efficacy, and here, a group of patients that were selected from Poland and from Sweden, from Dr. Karolina Poplowska-Dumasewicz and Professor Peyrodin’s group, was compared to data of foslevodopa-foscarbidopa in the Middle East, which has a mixture of Arabic and Asian patients put together at the Parkinson Center of Excellence by Dr. Vinod Mehta, who’s the director there. And in that paper, in that very nice comparative data of one year, it shows equal efficacy in not just white Caucasian patients, but also in the non-white group, in this case, mainly Asian patients and Arabic patients. To me, that’s very exciting because apart from another drug called opicapone, you have very little data on cross-racial studies. And I think the policymakers will in future look at this, that, okay, you’re coming to me with a lot of data, but what is the racial distribution of your data? So that element of it is quite exciting. And, of course, the other element that’s really exciting to me that it does offer is 24-hour levodopa therapy, which means in many patients, up to 35, I would say even up to 40% of patients, you can stop all other medications. So in this complex part of Parkinson’s, when things become really complex symptom-wise, they’re on a host of other medication. They might have hypertension, diabetes, high cholesterol. They’re on treatment for all of that stuff. The more you optimize and make your Parkinson’s medication simple, the better it is. So in many patients, we can just put them on the fos, and they might need one extra tablet, and that’s it when they were taking up to maybe 20, 15 to 20 other medications for Parkinson’s. So that’s another real great advantage, monotherapy with foslevodopa-foscarbidopa. And then I think the further research I think that would really need to be done is to show how it’s modifying sleep or benefiting sleep, but not just sleep. There’s also data, preliminary data, that urinary function is involved, is improved. Urinary dysfunction is common in Parkinson’s and can be extremely disruptive, particularly a thing called nocturia, where a patient is getting up two, three, four times at night to pass urine. It appears, at least there is one paper suggesting that foslevopdopa-foscarbidopa may be very effective against nocturia. So that’s another area that I think future research should focus on. And also sleep, as I said before, what’s its effect on sleep architecture? Now, sleep architecture might be quite different to what’s happening with the patient’s sleep function. But still, it will be interesting to see because that’s virtually every patient we’ve used the drug on, they report how much better they’re sleeping, not just them, but also their partners at night. It also may have an effect on things such as restless leg syndrome, which is very common in Parkinson’s, but also probably REM behavior disorder, but those studies would need to be done.

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