The School of Chemistry's Professor Mathew Horrocks has been awarded proof-of-concept funding of over £124,000 from the Scottish Government to develop a groundbreaking drug screening platform for Parkinson's disease. The technology enables high-throughput screening of compounds that target the small, soluble forms of misfolded proteins believed to drive neurodegeneration. Until now, these species have been impossible to measure at the scale required for drug discovery.The platform will also be adaptable to Alzheimer's disease, Motor Neuron Disease, and other protein-aggregation conditions. This funding allows us to take a technology that works in a specialised optics lab and prove it can operate at industrial scale. This will enable us to screen thousands of compounds per day, seeing if any of them can remove the species that cause damage in Parkinson’s disease Mathew Horrocks Professor of Biophysics The Horrocks Group project is one of four University of Edinburgh projects which have together secured £750,000 to support commercialisation. Read more about the awards in the Edinburgh Innovations news story via the link below. Proof of concept funding for four university research projects This article was published on Monday 5 October 2026
