The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved AbbVie’s next generation dopamine-based Parkinson’s disease therapy, tavapadon – potentially validating the company’s $8.7bn takeover of the drug’s original developer, Cerevel Therapeutics.
As per an update to the agency’s website, tavapadon, which AbbVie will market as Juvmo, was approved as a treatment to help improve motor function in adults with Parkinson’s disease on 25 September. The drug acts as a partial agonist of the D1 and D5 receptors.
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Unlike traditional dopamine-based therapies such as levodopa, which generally bind to a variety of dopamine receptors, Cerevel designed Juvmo to selectively target D1 receptors, which are more specifically involved in the regulation of motor function – thus potentially reducing the non-motor side effects linked to D2 and D3 drug binding. Through this more precise mechanism, as well as its extended half-life, Juvmo is intended to offer patients a new and potentially optimised form of dopamine-based therapy for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease.
While neither AbbVie nor the FDA has publicly debuted the bases of Juvmo’s Parkinson’s approval, it likely stemmed from the positive outcomes of the Phase III TEMPO programme (NCT04201093; NCT04223193; NCT04542499; NCT04760769) which looked at the drug across both flexible and fixed dosing schedules in patients with various stages and presentations of Parkinson’s. According to a paper published in Diseases, Juvmo significantly improved motor symptoms in treated patients in TEMPO-1 and 2, while significantly reducing motor fluctuations alongside levodopa versus levodopa alone in the TEMPO-3 trial.
AbbVie originally secured the rights to Juvmo through its $8.7bn takeover of neurology specialist, Cerevel Therapeutics, in 2024. In a research note from April 2026, William Blair analysts noted that they see mid-to-long-term commercial potential in AbbVie’s Parkinson’s franchise, which includes Juvmo and continuous dopamine replacement therapy, Vyalev (foscarbidopa/foslevodopa). According to the analysts, Juvmo and Vyalev could act as “meaningful growth drivers” for the company.
Parkinson’s treatment on the cusp of a breakthrough, experts say
Juvmo’s FDA approval marks the end of an innovation dry spell in the Parkinson’s space, as the current standard of care (SoC) still revolves around levodopa, a drug that originally debuted on the market more than five decades ago.
While Juvmo will provide a more selective dopamine-targeted therapy, David Dexter, head of research at non-profit Parkinson’s UK, previously told Pharmaceutical Technology that drugmakers are edging closer to commercialising the first disease-modifying therapies (DMTs) for Parkinson’s, which would mark a pivotal development for the segment.
However, Dexter noted that the heterogeneity of Parkinson’s, as well as a lack of current standard clinical trial endpoints to measure a drug’s effectiveness in the disease, are holding back progress. To overcome this, he touted the promise of moving away from subjective clinical assessments – instead favouring more objective digital, blood, and imaging-based biomarkers.
According to a recent report from GlobalData, parent company of Pharmaceutical Technology, the Parkinson’s space is expected to reach a value of $7bn across the seven major markets (7MM: the US, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK, and Japan) in 2033.
