Baamkuch by Rotary

The Rotary Foundation, involved in the fight against Parkinson’s through several fundraising campaigns since many years, will celebrate the 100 years of the Foundation and present its centennial cake.

A forest of 2000 pieces of the traditional Baamkuch, so 100 meters of cake, will be presented in rue de la Reine. The Baamkuch pieces will be available for purchase and all the profits will fund a research project on Parkinson’s disease.

Book your Baamkuch piece here!

The Rotary and the research on Parkinson’s disease – the HOPE 4 PARKINSON PROJECT

The profits of the Pillow Fight event and Baamkuch sales will be used to study how a patient’s genome shapes his predisposition to develop Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the most frequent neurodegenerative movement disorder. It is mainly characterized by a loss of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra that results in motor dysfunction. Several genes causative for familial forms of PD as well as risk factors have already been identified. It is, however, still unclear why patients sharing the same mutation in a gene display broad variation in severity of symptoms as well as time of disease onset. In the project supported by the Rotary, researchers from the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) and the Life Science Research Unit (LSRU) of the University will investigate dopaminergic nerve cells that have been derived from patients skin cells and compare them to their clinical data and genetic profiles to find out what causes this variability. Understanding preventive or risk factors will be important to develop better treatments and prevention strategies.

Already before, biomedical research in Luxembourg has received generous support by Rotary. To this end, the Luxembourg’s Rotary clubs, in collaboration with their Rotary friends in Briey and Salernes, and the Rotary Foundation in the United States, which is celebrating its centenary this year, launched the Project "Hope 4 Parkinson". Thanks to this project, the researchers and doctors received a new instrument worth 75 000 EUR, during an event in a festive setting at the CHL. It is an optical coherence tomography instrument, also known as an OCT instrument, which generates three-dimensional high definition images of biological tissues. With this instrument the researchers will investigate how the OCT instrument can facilitate the diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases.