During their visit and lectures at the LCSB last week, Prof. Michele Hu and Prof. Richard Wade-Martins from the Oxford Parkinson’s Disease Centre (OPDC) exchanged their experiences from the last five years with researchers from Luxembourg and started a collaboration within the National Centre of Excellence in Research on Parkinson’s Disease (NCER-PD) research program.
Oxford has set up a Parkinson’s disease cohort already in 2010. Since its foundation more than 1500 patients and control subjects from the Thames Valley area have taken part in the OPDC Discovery cohort, which is led by neurologist Prof. Michele Hu. Similarly to the Luxembourg Parkinson Study, patients undergo various clinical and neuropsychological tests and can give different samples (blood, skin, urine, saliva and others) for molecular analysis. In addition, the OPDC is highly specialized in brain imaging and the use of mobile apps for home monitoring of motor symptoms.
“In the future, we aim to diagnose Parkinson’s disease even before motor symptoms arise and then treat patients with disease-modifying therapies. The aim of the OPDC Discovery cohort is to test and validate a range of biomarkers both for early prediction of PD and its subsequent progression”, Prof. Michele Hu explains the overall aim of the study. “We see that innovative mobile apps could help us in achieving our goals: not only do they help us in gathering data more frequently, but they are extremely well suited for picking up even the smallest changes.” Therefore, in the future mobile phones could play an important role as potential biomarkers to identify people at risk for Parkinson’s disease.
The OPDC study also extends beyond the patient cohort. In the second part of the centre’s activities, researchers develop new methods to model Parkinson’s disease in human induced pluripotent stem cells and physiologically relevant genetic rodent models for drug target discovery in the laboratory. Prof. Richard Wade-Martins, OPDC Principal Investigator, says: “We share many goals with the Luxembourg study and are really impressed with how quickly the NCER-PD resarch programme has started. We are looking forward to further expand our collaboration with Luxembourg in several areas, for example in the use of powerful patient stem cell-derived neuronal models of Parkinson's which is a really exciting area.”
Prof. Rejko Krüger from NCER-PD adds: “We are extremely happy to have found such great international partners like the OPDC. Based on the longstanding expertise of our partners we already profited a lot from their experiences. Together with our partners we are confident that joint projects and data analyses from both studies will provide an important added value for PD research.”