For more than five years, urine and cerebral-spinal fluid samples from patients with Parkinson's disease have been locked in freezers in the NINDS National Repository, stored with the expectation they might someday help unravel the still-hidden course of this slow-acting neurodegenerative disease. Now, research by Andrew West, Ph.D., and colleagues at the University of Alabama at Birmingham has revealed that the tubes hold a brand-new type of biomarker -- a phosphorylated protein that correlates with the presence and severity of Parkinson's disease. West and colleagues, with support from the National Institutes of Health, the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Disease Research and the Parkinson's Disease Foundation, are digging deeper into these biobanked samples, to validate the biomarker as a possible guide for future clinical treatments and a monitor of the efficacy of potential new Parkinson's drugs in real time during treatment. A biomarker helps physicians predict, diagnose or monitor disease, because the biomarker corresponds to the presence or risk of disease, and its levels may change as the disease progresses. Validated biomarkers can aid both preclinical trial work in the laboratory and future clinical trials of drugs to treat Parkinson's. West and others are paving the way for an inhibitor drug that prevented neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration in an animal model of the disease, as reported last year by West and colleagues. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160705135353.htm
