Novel Parkinson’s therapies in the Oxford Discovery pipeline - Professor Richard Wade-Martins
Oxford Parkinson's Disease Centre principal investigator, Professor Richard Wade-Martins, discusses how dopamine neurons grown in a dish in our labs are helping us to understand of these cells are affected in Parkinson's.
Some of the key scientific discoveries we've made over the last few years focus on the use of patient stem cells to study Parkinson's. Because of the generosity of the people with Parkinson's that we work with we're able to obtain skin biopsies, we can take them back to the lab and reprogramme those skin cells into stem cells. Once you've got stem cells, you can make any cell type you're interested in.
For a long time, the work of the Parkinson's Centre has been to make dopamineric neurons these key neuronal cell types that start to die off in Parkinson's. We've made these neurons from people with Parkinson's and from healthy individuals, and identified some of the changes in cell biology that occur in these neurons. These changes can include, for example, protein stress, handling protein or folding protein.
If proteins such as alpha-synuclein can't be folded correctly, the cells simply ejects them out of the cell. This idea of neurons throwing out alpha-synuclein which we see in the neurons in the dish that we study, may be one way in which Parkinson's spreads throughout the brain.
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