What is MSU's mission in fighting Parkinson’s disease?
New therapeutics are desperately needed for the debilitating consequences of Parkinson’s disease (PD). PD is a disorder of the brain that slowly robs a patient of the ability to move, eventually leaving them totally frozen. Here at MSU, our highest priority is developing treatments to slow or halt the symptoms of PD.
How is MSU fulfilling this mission?
Michigan State University’s College of Human Medicine has recruited and empowered a world-class PD research team to discover the origins of the disease and translate this knowledge into a cure. Michigan State University’s PD team is a highly interknit team of Molecular Geneticists, Cell, Protein and Molecular Biologists, Biochemists, Neuroanatomists and Behavioral Scientists, all working toward the rapid development of new candidate therapies for PD. The team assembled at MSU was designated in 2009 by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as one of ten Morris K. Udall Centers of Excellence in Parkinson’s Disease: A designation only bestowed upon the very top university research programs in PD.
What resources do we currently have to achieve our goals?
The pace of discovery depends on time, effort, and resources. The team has been successful in competing nationally for grant support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as well as private foundations like the Michael J. Fox Foundation with over $100M in external awards since 2009. While such resources are the life blood of any competitive research program, they are typically earmarked for well researched, incremental development of existing projects.
What do we do to combat PD?
- We develop novel gene therapies to halt or reverse the progress of neurodegeneration in the Parkinsonian brain.
- We repurpose existing pharmaceuticals.
- We identify and develop unique neuroprotective agents to prevent the cell death associated with PD.
- We test compounds aimed at minimizing the debilitating movement disorders (dyskinesias) that are caused by existing drug therapies.
- We seek out treatments for the non-motor symptoms of PD including depression and GI dysfunction.
- We genotype PD patients to predict which therapies will be most effective for them.
- We identify the neuroprotective mechanisms and benefits of early intervention with the surgical procedure known as deep brain stimulation (DBS).
- We study the consequences of environmental toxicant exposure on the risk for developing PD.
- We educate the next generation of scientists in the fight against PD.