Verily—a Dallas-based health data platform and AI company owned by Google parent Alphabet Inc.— has received a $14.7 million grant from The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. The grant’s goal is to generate a comprehensive molecular dataset to advance Parkinson’s disease research.

Last year, Verily relocated its headquarters from San Francisco to Dallas. In more recent news, today it was announced that Stephen Gillett, Verily’s chairman, CEO, and president, has been named to the 2025 AI 75 List, presented by Dallas Innovates in partnership with the Dallas Regional Chamber.

The newly announced MJFF grant sets out a much-needed goal for Verily: It’s estimated that as many as 1 million people in the U.S. live with Parkinson’s disease, with nearly 90,000 new cases diagnosed annually. To fuel new research and potential therapies, data will be an indispensable resource. The new grant aims to build on years of collaboration between Verily and MJFF to assemble datasets and make them easily accessible to researchers worldwide.

Leveraging molecular profiling techniques

With support from the MJFF grant, Verily aims to generate one of the world’s largest, high-dimensional molecular datasets on Parkinson’s disease patients. To do that, it will use cutting-edge molecular profiling techniques to accompany clinical, imaging, and wearable-based behavioral and physiological data that’s been collected over several years as part of the Personalized Parkinson’s Project (PPP), a collaboration with the Radboud University Medical Center in The Netherlands.

A two-year longitudinal study of 520 people with Parkinson’s, PPP has generated detailed clinical histories, data from the Verily Study Watch, imaging data, and matched biospecimens, including blood and cerebrospinal fluid. All that data will be made available as a public resource to researchers through Verily’s Workbench solution, a “highly scalable” environment for researchers to safely collaborate and analyze unified datasets to advance research and discovery, Verily said.

This publicly available molecular data resource will be used “to accelerate the development of interventions that can improve the diagnosis of Parkinson’s, improve the ability to monitor disease progression, and enhance understanding of disease mechanisms that can be targeted therapeutically,” the company added.

Aiming to advance ‘new discoveries’ in Parkinson’s disease

Andrew Trister, MD

Andrew Trister, MD, PhD, chief medical and scientific officer at Verily, said his company is “dedicated to using data and technology to accelerate cutting edge research.”

“This grant expands upon our previous research efforts, enabling us to generate one of the most extensive molecular data assets of its kind, which global researchers will access through Verily’s platform to advance new discoveries in Parkinson’s disease,” Trister added in a statement.

The $14.7 million grant will fund the use of multiple laboratory methods on biospecimen samples from the PPP study to create one of the most detailed molecular Parkinson’s disease datasets, Verily said, noting that the data will consist of “deep real-world and molecular profiles, enabling the generation of insights into the mechanisms and signatures of the disease, and research to improve understanding of related genetics, immunology, and metabolism.”

Per Verily, molecular techniques to be used will include the generation of:

• A comprehensive, high-resolution immunogenomic data resource to fuel research on the immune system’s association with Parkinson’s disease pathogenesis.
• Whole genome sequences for those that have consented to enable discovery of genetic factors associated with different aspects of Parkinson’s disease.
• Metabolomic and alpha-Synuclein data, which have shown promise for assessing and predicting disease activity and stages.

The ultimate goal: breakthroughs and ‘novel therapies’

“Scientific understanding of Parkinson’s disease has advanced significantly over the past decade, and we continue to seek new answers on its genetic, immunological and molecular determinants,” said Mark Frasier, PhD, chief scientist at MJFF. “The Michael J. Fox Foundation supports a broad portfolio exploring biological forms of Parkinson’s disease through molecular phenotyping. As part of those efforts, Verily’s new data resource aims to enable researchers to achieve breakthroughs on the underlying mechanisms of the disease and develop novel therapies that can improve the quality of life for people with Parkinson’s disease and their caregivers.”

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