PDBP and BioFIND

The research record

This is the project's file for this landmark, as written and checked. Sources are listed at the end; anything not yet confirmed is marked "Not yet verified".

Who

The US National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) ran PDBP; the Michael J. Fox Foundation (MJFF) ran BioFIND with NINDS support, led by Un Jung Kang.

What happened

• PDBP. Set up by NINDS around 2012 (the dating comes from trade-press summaries, not a NIH page that could be read) to find biomarkers for early detection and tracking of progression. Investigators must share data through a web Data Management Resource, which also coordinates access to biosamples. The programme paper (Rosenthal et al., Mov Disord 2016) described eleven consortium projects, seven of them recruiting. By October 2014, 1,082 participants had enrolled (620 with Parkinson's, 101 with other parkinsonism, 23 with essential tremor and 338 controls), 1,040 with at least one biosample, and 6,898 biosamples were available (including 230 spinal-fluid samples).
• BioFIND (Fox Investigation for New Discovery of Biomarkers). A one-time cross-sectional, multicentre study. The 2016 paper (Movement Disorders) described a repository of blood, DNA, RNA, spinal fluid, saliva and urine from 118 moderate-to-advanced patients and 88 healthy controls, deliberately chosen for clearly typical Parkinson's, and shared openly.

Why it moved us toward a cure

Biomarker work, such as the later seed amplification assay, needs large, well-characterised sample sets for development and checking. Open sharing let many groups test ideas against the same samples. This is infrastructure, not a treatment.

Outcome

Advanced. Both created shared resources that later biomarker studies could draw on. Current use and size were not re-checked. Press accounts quote different BioFIND numbers (120 patients and 100 controls); the paper's 118 and 88 are used here and match its abstract.

Sources

• Kang et al., Mov Disord 2016;31:924–932, DOI 10.1002/mds.26613, PubMed 27113479 · MJFF record
• Rosenthal et al., Mov Disord 2016;31:915–923, DOI 10.1002/mds.26438, PubMed 26442452
• NIH notice on PDBP
• Checked 19 Oct 2026: no erratum or retraction listed in Europe PMC for the two programme papers. The PMC4824671 link used before was removed because its content could not be confirmed.
• Not yet verified: the exact PDBP launch date (the NIH notice page returned an access error) and its current size; BioFIND's funders beyond MJFF and NIH grant support (listed in PubMed).