Launching today, Landmark is a groundbreaking three-year research programme that aims to understand Parkinson’s in unprecedented detail. The project brings together Parkinson’s UK, Imperial College London, GSK, Novartis, Roche and UCB for the first time, and has been made possible by a founding gift of £4 million from the Gatsby charitable foundation. Parkinson’s is the fastest growing neurological condition in the world and affects around 153,000 people in the UK.
The condition is caused by a lack of dopamine in the brain and there are more than 40 symptoms, from tremor and pain to anxiety. Despite decades of research, treatments that can stop, reverse or prevent Parkinson’s remain out of reach. Although inroads have been made in understanding the causes of the condition, a complete picture of how and why people develop Parkinson’s still eludes experts.
The Landmark project will apply a technique called snRNAseq (single nucleusRibonucleic Acid sequencing) to quantify hundreds of tissue samples from the Parkinson’s UK Brain Bank, in order to create a map of gene expression in Parkinson’s across different cell types. They will also analyze changes in: How gene expression is managed by cells ( epigenetics ) How the changes in gene expression alter which proteins are present inside these cells (proteomics) How the changes in gene expression alter which smaller molecules are present (metabolomics) How mutations, in individual patients, affect gene expression (genet.