Folding Forum

I have looked a bit, not sure where to look fully, but i am curious if there are any active units that are doing research for Parkinson's Disease, and the project if there is one. Thanks.

-W.Feather

I'm sorry, but the answer is no.

We have also performed preliminary studies on a key protein implicated in Parkinson's disease. Alpha-synuclein is a natively unfolded protein and its folding/misfolding (see figure on the right for misfolded aggregates) appears to be critically linked to PD. We are evaluating the application of various FAH methods to this problem.

2005

•We have only done a pilot study on PD and are looking for funding to continue our work in this area.
•Prof. Vijay Pande presented recent FAH work on AD at the National Parkinson's Foundation conference (in the session on AD and its connections to PD).

For now, PD stands still as a pilot project, with the bulk of our efforts going into AD and HD.

Hopefully they will restart the project soon.

If you go to the All Projects Descriptions page, http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/allprojects there are no results for a search on "Parkinson" or "Alpha-synuclein" or "synuclein". Thus I think it would be safe to say that there are no active projects on this disease, and I'd guess that there's been no progress since 2005 according to that page JonnazDJ quoted. A shame though, I'd like to see some more of these diseases tackled. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but other than the SMP/bigadv WUs crunching proteins involved with viruses, there seems to be more general biochemical studies than disease research at the moment than I would have expected.

Very true, Jesse. Now I'm not really complaining, this general research will benefit a lot of diseases related research in the long term. I know that there are active diabetes and Alzheimers projects running at this moment, and some projects related to cancer.

thats what i was wondering, I was looking to make sure that I did not miss anything as F@H is the only DC project i can find that seems to even reference PD.