Episode 79: How Clinical Studies Help People with PD

Dr. Schwarzschild is a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Julieanne Dorn Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. With an undergraduate foundation in biochemistry he pursued a doctoral thesis on the neurochemistry of tyrosine hydroxylase, the enzyme controlling dopamine biosynthesis. After neurology residency and Parkinson's disease (PD) fellowship training at MGH he developed a translational research program focusing on the role of purines — adenosine, caffeine and urate — among environmental and genetic influences in animal models and clinical studies of PD. He directs the Molecular Neurobiology Lab at the MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease where his interdisciplinary research program spans the neurobiology, epidemiology and clinical science of Parkinson’s. His group is currently focused on the development of clinical trials to prevent PD, building off recent advances in identifying prodromally and genetically at-risk populations. In 2018 he was elected to a 2nd six-year term leading the Parkinson Study Group (PSG), a consortium of North American clinical trial sites and investigators dedicated to finding improved treatments for people with Parkinson’s. At MGH he cares for patients with PD and their families in a weekly movement disorders clinic.

Dr. Simuni graduated from Leningrad Medical School and completed an internship in medicine in Leningrad, Russia. She subsequently completed an internship in internal medicine at Albert Einstein Medical Center and a neurology residency and a clinical neurophysiology fellowship at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She then pursued a movement disorders fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, where she served on the clinical faculty of the Department of Neurology for three years and held the position of Medical Co-Director of the Parkinson’s disease and Movement Disorders surgical program.

Dr. Simuni joined the faculty of the Northwestern University in 2000 to build and lead a multidisciplinary movement disorders center that is recognized by the Parkinson’s Foundation and Wilson’s Foundation and serves as a training model in the region. She is the lead investigator of a number of clinical trials on experimental pharmacology, non-motor manifestations, and pharmacological management of PD. She is currently the Investigator of more than a dozen clinical trials. She serves on a number of Steering Committees for the PD national clinical trials, several committees of the Parkinson Study Group and the Parkinson’s Foundation. She is the Site PI and serve on the Steering Committee for the largest PD biomarker initiative funded by the MJFF (PPMI study). Dr. Simuni is the site PI for the Network for Excellence in Neuroscience Clinical Trials (NEXT) Northwestern Clinical Site (U10). She has more than one hundred publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals and she has lectured nationally and internationally on movement disorders.