Year 1

In the first year of our CIRM Early Translational II Award we have largely accomplished the first two aims put forth in our proposal “Crosstalk: Inflammation in Parkinson’s disease (PD) in a humanized in vitro model.” Dr. Juergen Winkler, in Erlangen, Germany, has enrolled 10 patients and 6 controls in this project, most of which have had a biopsy of their skin cells sent to The Salk Institute in La Jolla. In Dr. Gage’s lab at The Salk Institute these patient fibroblasts are being reprogrammed into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), and initial attempts at differentiation into dopaminergic neurons are underway. Additionally, patient blood cells have been sent from Dr. Winkler’s clinic to the lab of Dr. Glass at UC San Diego, where their gene expression profile is being determined. In this initial reporting period we are successfully building the cellular tools necessary to investigate the role of nuclear receptors and inflammation in Parkinson’s Disease.