Year 2

In the second year of our CIRM Early Translational II Award we are making substantial progress towards completing all three aims put forth in our proposal. Dr. Juergen Winkler, our German collaborator, has completed the patient recruitment phase of this project, and skin cells from all 16 subjects (10 with PD and six controls) have been reprogrammed into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) at the Salk Institute in La Jolla. The patient-specific iPSCs have been differentiated into well-characterized neural stem cells, which the Gage lab is further differentiating into both dopaminergic neurons and astrocytes. In addition to collecting patient skin cells, Dr. Winkler’s group has collected blood cells which are currently being analyzed for gene expression differences by Dr. Glass’ lab at UCSD using state-of-the-art RNA sequencing technology. We have identified a compound that is anti-inflammatory in human cells that we will test on the patient-specific cells once we finish building the cellular tools required to investigate the role of nuclear receptors and inflammation in Parkinson’s Disease.