Study Overview

All drugs at a glance

Every year, Kevin McFarthing and the team at the British charity Cure Parkinson's analyse which drugs are currently being tested in clinical trials for Parkinson's. The wheel above shows the situation on 16 January 2025. Click on it to see it large, and click again to enlarge it further.

• Upper half: drugs meant to slow, stop or reverse the course of the disease.
• Lower half: drugs meant to relieve symptoms.
• Sections: phase 1 on the left, phase 2 at the top and bottom, phase 3 on the right. The number in brackets shows in how many trials a drug is being tested at the same time.
• Colours: the target, for example inflammation, alpha-synuclein, mitochondria or the gut.

I know some of these from my own path: lithium, nicotinamide riboside (which I stopped in October 2026 after the disappointing NOPARK trial, see Research 2026), psilocybin and the transfer of gut bacteria (microbiome transfer).

Ten years of Parkinson's trials in numbers

In May 2026 the team published a review of ten years (Journal of Parkinson's Disease). This is what I find most interesting:

• From 2015 to 2024, 444 drug trials started, testing 281 different drugs with more than 39,000 participants in total.
• 52 percent of the drugs were completely new, 33 percent were known drugs from other fields repurposed for Parkinson's, and 16 percent were new formulations of known drugs.
• 63 percent of the trials targeted symptoms, 37 percent aimed to slow the course of the disease.
• Only 55 of the 444 trials, or 12 percent, were phase 3 trials. That is the last big step before approval. Most trials were smaller phase 1 or phase 2 studies.
• In January 2025, 133 trials were still running. 224 had been completed and 31 had been stopped early.

What this means to me

The numbers show how long the road is from an idea to an approved drug. To this day there is no drug that has been proven to slow Parkinson's. That is why I did not want to wait, and why I tackled many things at once from the start. At the same time the wheel gives me hope: a great many researchers around the world are working on very different approaches.

Continuously updated overviews

• Cure Parkinson's
• ClinicalTrials.gov, the official US trial registry, where almost all studies worldwide are listed

I sum up the most important developments of the year under Research 2026.