Novel Therapeutic Targets for Parkinson's disease

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a debilitating neurodegenerative disorder that affects over 7 million people worldwide. Hallmark symptom of PD is the inability to initiate and maintain voluntary movement which results from the loss of midbrain dopamine neurons. Current PD therapies (e.g. levodopa) only relieve the symptoms but do not modify the disease progression. The current project aims to identify and characterize (i) novel therapeutic targets to slow or halt the progression of PD and (ii) novel sex-specific targets for neuroprotection or symptomatic relief in PD. Approaches include toxin- and genetic-based animal models of Parkinson’s diseases, stereotaxic neurosurgery, intracerebral drug administration, assessment of rodent behaviour, analysis of post-mortem PD patient brain tissue, pateneuroanatomy, qRT-PCR, immunohistochemistry, and electrophysiology.