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.
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.
The FDA's decision to approval Juvmo 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.
