Yesse Technologies secures another grant from The Michael J. Fox Foundation to sniff out Parkinson's disease

NEW YORK, Jan. 19, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Yesse Technologies, Inc., a New York-headquartered biotechnology company, developing a technology platform to digitize the sense of smell, announces today that it was awarded a $670,000 grant from The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research. The funds will be used to advance its nose-on-chip platform to detect the characteristic smell linked to Parkinson's disease (PD).

Yesse Technologies scientists recently validated the presence of a distinctive smell, arising from an oily skin secretion called sebum, in patients diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. The previous identification of a specific subset of odorant receptors, the proteins in the nose that detect smells, forms the foundation for further development of a lab-based smell test to detect Parkinson's potentially at very early stages of the disease.

"We are thrilled that The Michael J. Fox Foundation continues to fund our cutting-edge science in their mission to transform the way new Parkinson's disease treatments are developed and tested," says Dr. Charlotte D'Hulst, CEO & Co-Founder of Yesse Technologies, Inc.

Yesse Technologies will be collaborating on this research with expert Prof. Bas Bloem, a Parkinson's neurologist at Radboudumc and founder of the Parkinson Centrum Nijmegen (ParC). "We are running one of the largest clinical studies reviewing the long-term effect of Parkinson's disease in patients: the Personalized Parkinson Project. By collecting patient sebum samples and providing them to Yesse Technologies, we are facilitating the potential development of a much-needed, non-invasive biomarker for Parkinson's disease, enabling more efficient treatments down the road," says Prof. Bloem.

About Yesse Technologies
Yesse Technologies is an early-stage biotech company building a technology platform that harnesses the biology of the nose and merges it with cutting-edge nanotechnology. The Company's mission is to decode the last mystery of the senses, olfaction, and to unlock the power of a new field, Odoromics™, disrupting Flavor & Fragrance R&D pipelines and enabling odor-based disease diagnostics. Yesse Technologies' core technology, the ORion21^™ genetic platform, is the product of over 30 years of fundamental research on the molecular biology of the sense of smell and is exclusively licensed from The City University of New York. To fuel its chip R&D, Yesse Technologies has established a research partnership with imec (Belgium), an internationally recognized R&D powerhouse for nanochip technology. For more information, visit yesse.tech.

About Radboudumc Center of Expertise for Parkinson & Movement Disorders 
The Center of Expertise for Parkinson and Movement Disorders is part of the department of Neurology, Radboud University Medical Center (Radboudumc). The Radboudumc is a leading academic center for patient care, education and research, with the mission 'to have a significant impact on healthcare'. Their activities help to improve healthcare and consequently the health of individuals and of society. They achieve that by providing excellent quality, participatory and personalized healthcare, operational excellence and by working together in sustainable networks. This mission is at the core of the Center of Expertise as well. The Center receives nation-wide referrals and evaluates ~500 new Parkinson patients each year. The Center is recognized from 2005 onwards as a center of excellence for Parkinson's disease.

SOURCE Yesse Technologies, Inc.