Crosstalk: Inflammation in Parkinson’s disease (PD) in a humanized in vitro model

Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is the most common neurodegenerative movement disorder. It is characterized by motor impairment such as slowness of movements, shaking and gait disturbances. Age is the most consistent risk factor for PD, and as we have an aging population, it is of upmost importance that we find therapies to limit the social, economic and emotional burden of this disease. Most of the studies to find better drugs for PD have been done in rodents. However, many of these drugs failed when tested in PD patients. One problem is that we can only investigate the diseased neurons of the brain after the PD patients have died. We propose to use skin cells from PD patients and reprogram these into neurons and other surrounding cells in the brain called glia. This is a model to study the disease while the patient is still alive. We will investigate how the glial surrounding cells affect the survival of neurons. We will also test drugs that are protective for glial cells and neurons. Overall, this approach is advantageous because it allows for the study of pathological development of PD in a human system. The goal of this project is to identify key molecular events involved at early stages in PD and exploit these as potential points of therapeutic intervention.