A multi-institutional team of scientists has received a grant from the Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP) initiative to use stem cells to study how risk factors accumulate and interact to drive Parkinson’s disease (PD).
The team is led by Lorenz Studer, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and includes including Gist Croft, of The NYSCF Research Institute; Vikram Khurana, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and a NYSCF – Robertson stem cell investigator; Jian Peng, of (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and Joseph Powell, of Garvan Institute of Medical Research.
The team will receive $9 million over three years to take a comprehensive look at the interplay between genetics, aging, and different brain cell types underlying individual risk for PD in a project entitled, “Defining the cellular and molecular determinants of variable genetic penetrance in Parkinson’s disease.”