University of Michigan gets $11.5M grant to launch five-year Parkinson's disease study

Monday October 06, 2014

Jeremy Allen

MLive.com - Scientists and doctors at the University of Michigan were given an $11.5 million grant to launch a five-year study into better treating and understanding Parkinson's disease – with the main goal of understanding how changes in the brain cells lead to dangerous falls.

With the grant – administered by the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke, part of the National Institutes of Health – U-M will become one of only nine homes of the Morris K. Udall Centers of Excellence in Parkinson's Disease Research in the country.

The National Parkinson's foundation estimates that upwards of 60,000 people are diagnosed with the disease each year, adding to the nearly 1 million people who currently have it.

The U-M investigators will focus on the cholinergic system – a brain chemical system that is rapidly emerging as a key player in the disease's effect on walking and balance. Researchers say the cholinergic system helps focus one's attention on tasks such as walking, and may be the next key target for Parkinson's treatments.

"Understanding the role of the cholinergic system is a key unexplored frontier in Parkinson's disease, and will allow us to go beyond the limits of current practice, so we can create better therapies to suppress the terrible symptoms of the disease that affect balance, walking and overall independence," William Dauer, who will be the center's director said in a news release.

Dauer directs the UMHS Movement Disorders program and is the Elinor Levine Professor of Neurology, and an associate professor of Cell and Molecular Biology, in the U-M Medical School.

He added that most Parkinson's disease research and treatment focuses on the brain's dopamine system, which normally helps control movement. This control breaks down in Parkinson's patients, as more and more dopamine-producing brain cells called neurons are lost.

The new center will conduct three interrelated projects to better understand the role of the cholinergic system in falls, focusing on the effect of lost cholinergic neurons in brain areas called the basal forebrain, which regulates attention, and the pedunculopontine nucleus, which controls balance.

The team will work to study the effects, in both rats and people, and to determine if it may be possible to increase cholinergic traffic in the brains of patients using an already-approved drug that targets acetylcholine receptors on the surface of brain cells.

That drug, varenicline or Chantix, is currently available by prescription to help people stop smoking.

The U-M Udall Center team includes researchers in the medical school who treat Parkinson's patients at the U-M Health System and the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System, as well as a neuroscientist in the College of Literature, Science & the Arts, and biostatisticians from the schools of Nursing and Public Health.

The center will also partner with the Michigan Alzheimer's Disease Center in minority outreach efforts, and run a Udall Center Fellows program, co-funded by U-M Medical School and the Department of Neurology.

It will allow physicians and physician-scientists interested in Parkinson's disease to receive two years of intensive training and participate in center research.

http://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/index.ssf/2014/10/u-m_gets_115m_grant_to_launch.html