RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT – A stem cell-based model offers new insights into the mechanisms of neuronal loss in Parkinson’s disease

IMPRiND partners UOXF and CNRS have now come up with a working laboratory model. They used induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) derived from both healthy subjects and patients with the alpha-synuclein gene defects to generate human dopaminergic neurons that are primarily affected in Parkinson’s disease. They found a way of ‘amplifying’ in a fairly pure form, the main constituent, called fibril, of alpha-synuclein clumps directly from post-mortem Parkinson’s brains. When they added these brain-derived fibrils onto the human dopaminergic neurons, they successfully triggered the aggregation of alpha-synuclein inside the cells and observed progressive neuronal loss.

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Publication of an IMPRiND Nature Comm. paper

A great IMPRiND achievement: Nature Comm. paper on α-synuclein strain effects in iPSC-dopaminergic neurons.

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This project receives funding from the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking (www.imi.europa.eu) under grant agreement No 116060. This Joint Undertaking receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and EFPIA.

This work is supported by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education‚ Research and Innovation (SERI) under contract number 17.00038.

The opinions expressed and arguments employed herein do not necessarily reflect the official views of these funding bodies.

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