Dr. James Beck 00:00:04
Hi, my name is Dr. Jim Beck. I'm the Chief Scientific Officer of the Parkinson's Foundation. In this episode of NeuroTalk, I will tell you how donations help support our research programs and our effort to understand and cure Parkinson's disease.
Donations that come to the Foundation are utilized in many different ways to support research. One of the critical ways we are able to support research is through our individual grant award programs. We support millions of dollars a year in research that's designed to better understand Parkinson's disease and maybe one day lead to a cure. Your donation to the Parkinson's Foundation will provide critical support to early-career scientists who are trying to make an impact in Parkinson's disease. It'll help neurologists who want to take care of people with Parkinson's disease by funding our movement disorder fellowship training program. It'll help support our Centers of Excellence network, which provides comprehensive care to people with Parkinson's disease.
It'll help support our new initiatives like PD GENEration, which offers free genetic testing and counseling to up to 15,000 people with Parkinson's disease. One example of how your donation is supporting research is with Dr. Liana Rosenthal at Johns Hopkins University.
Dr. James Beck 00:01:18
Dr. Rosenthal received a grant to study a protein that may predict dementia progression in Parkinson's disease. She's looking for markers of dementia in people with PD, with the goal of determining whether a specific, less toxic strain of alpha-synuclein is associated with slower progression of dementia. Another way your generous donation is helping support Parkinson's research is through our Research Centers program. Here, a two-million-dollar grant was made to a leading academic institution to help support team science. We believe that scientists working together to better understand Parkinson's disease is a way we can move the ball forward in the most efficient way possible.
To receive Foundation funding, each of the research centers must undertake three interconnected research programs that can help us understand Parkinson's disease. Another way your generous donation is helping to support PD research is with our PD GENEration study, Mapping the Future of Parkinson's Disease. The goal of the PD GENEration study is to provide free genetic testing and counseling to up to 15,000 people with Parkinson's disease in the clinic. This is a first-of-its-kind study offered to people with Parkinson's disease in the United States. Knowing that a breakthrough can happen at any time, the Parkinson's Foundation consistently funds different types of research. Learn more about the research underway now at Parkinson.org/Research.
