What is it about?
In the earliest stages of Parkinson’s disease (PD), the changes that eventually cause damage to neurons take place quietly in the brain long before patients show any symptoms. Without a test that can detect these changes, it’s difficult to intervene early to slow disease progression. We have developed a molecular test that successfully detected and quantified telltale protein clumps in tissue and fluid samples obtained from patients with PD. The test captured the presence of single ⍺-synuclein fibrils, the disease-causing proteins that are a hallmark of PD and other neurodegenerative disorders collectively known as ⍺-synucleinopathies.
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Why is it important?
This work is an important step toward our goal to develop a method to detect and quantify a key marker of Parkinson’s disease to help clinicians identify patients much earlier, and thus keep PD and related neurodegenerative disorders much more effectively at bay,
Perspectives
Having a biomarker that we can quantify could help us identify new drug candidates, and test their effects in more targeted patient cohorts at early stages of the diseases.
David Walt
Brigham And Women's Hospital
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Toward the quantification of α-synuclein aggregates with digital seed amplification assays, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, January 2024, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2312031121.
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