Researchers from multiple disciplines join forces to stop Parkinson's disease

It was a great day when Health received a letter stating that the Lundbeck Foundation had granted DKK 313 million for research into Parkinson's disease and other Lewy Body Disorders.

Thanks to the considerable grant, a new research centre in Aarhus will work on slowing down or stopping the development of the serious disease that is affecting an increasing number of Danes.

On 26 February, DR aired a segment about the new centre - get more information here (in Danish).

The Parkinson’s centre will not only deliver ground-breaking discoveries, it will also ensure that the results of those discoveries quickly benefit patients. The ambitious goal of the centre is to begin clinical trials within 10 years, says Per Borghammer, a professor at Aarhus University and senior hospital physician at Aarhus University Hospital (AUH).

Per Borghammer will also be the new centre director, and his first task will be to build a research environment where some of the best Danish and foreign researchers can collaborate in completely new ways.

The centre will soon begin recruiting talented researchers from all over the world. The centre is expected to hire approximately 70 employees over the next few years.

Moving day for researchers from the Department of Biomedicine

One of the fundamental ideas behind the centre is to have experts from different research fields working closely together. This means that basic researchers from the Department of Biomedicine will move from the University Park to the new centre, which will be located at Aarhus University Hospital in Skejby.

The offices will be located in the INCUBA research park – a five-minute walk from the centre’s specialised research facilities and laboratories at Aarhus University Hospital, where basic researchers will continue their research on molecules, cells and animal models. However, they will do so in close proximity to clinical researchers and their patient groups and with collaborative relationships with epidemiologists, who conduct registry research on larger population groups.

“One of the core success criteria is to bring together researchers who might normally be located somewhat far from each other. A great many important discoveries occur at the intersection of disciplines," says Per Borghammer.

A complicated process

Work on the funding application was conducted in a close collaboration between researchers particularly at the Department of Biomedicine and researchers at the Department of Clinical Medicine,” says Dean Anne-Mette Hvas.

“It’s no secret that developing a joint neuroscience venture with the Lundbeck Foundation was a long and complicated process. We’ve considered different disease areas, which means a lot of researchers in the neuroscience community have contributed many hours to the process," she says.

“I’m so glad that everything’s settled now and that we’ll have a centre that will further enhance the world-class Parkinson's research already being conducted in Aarhus. And I look forward to the synergy that will arise when researchers in the Parkinson's field work together with our other strong points such as stroke research, MRI and PET imaging, neurophysiology and epilepsy research. "I’m grateful to everyone who helped make the establishment of a centre of this calibre in Aarhus a reality," says Anne-Mette Hvas, highlighting the help and commitment of dedicated people at the Faculty of Natural Sciences and the Psychiatry Services of Central Denmark Region.

She adds that the faculty is now working with the Lundbeck Foundation on a further initiative within biological psychiatry.

Join us

The Lundbeck Foundation Parkinson's Disease Research Center – or PACE in more colloquial terms – will also build strong bridges to the Department of Clinical Epidemiology and the Department of Neurology at Aarhus University Hospital and the Department of Public Health at AU, which has some of the world's best data on the impact of air pollution and pesticides on the risk of developing Parkinson's disease.

Per Borghammer also hopes that many of the other strong research environments in Aarhus working with Parkinson's will become involved with the centre.

 “Now that the center has been established, one of the absolute success criteria will be that we establish strong collaborations, so that PACE will include both core group leaders and a number of affiliated research groups,” he says.

Blood may be the key

Parkinson's disease is the fastest growing brain disease in the world measured by the number of cases. The goal is for the centre to conduct clinical trials with patients and provide initial evidence for the effectiveness of new treatments within the next 10 years.

At the same time, researchers will be working on finding new ways of detecting Parkinson’s disease earlier – perhaps through blood tests, scans, sleep studies, skin biopsies, or samples from the gastrointestinal tract.

Per Borghammer explains that several exciting projects within this area are already planned.

One of the projects is a collaboration with the Danish Blood Donor Study (DBDS). Together with Christian Erikstrup, professor and senior hospital physician, the plan is to recruit newly diagnosed Parkinson's patients who are also blood donors.

“The blood donor study is a unique research resource because it stores multiple blood samples from patients, which means we can test new diagnostics for Parkinson's on a blood sample taken 5-10 years before the patient even knew they were sick. This would be virtually impossible without the DBDS," says Per Borghammer.

Sleep monitoring equipment in your mailbox

Another example of an exciting synergy is the collaboration with the Center for Ear-EEG at the Faculty of Technical Sciences at Aarhus University. Professor Preben Kidmose from the Center for Ear-EEG has developed a less invasive way of tracking the brain's electrical activity and mapping sleep patterns.

This is interesting because a percentage of Parkinson's patients experience disruptions during their REM sleep and this symptom can occur 10-15 years before diagnosis.

The collaboration involves conducting advanced sleep studies of possible Parkinson's patients using a small device the size of a mobile phone.

“Today, people have to sleep in a video-EEG sleeping room at the neurological department, covered in electrodes and wires. The goal is to send the small device by mail to the patient, and the device can then carry at examination in the person's own home, which is almost as good as the one carried out at the hospital," explains Per Borghammer.

Learning much more about the disease

The vision for the new centre is to identify new treatment targets: molecules, receptors or cellular processes that can slow down or ultimately stop the disease.

“It’s ambitious. But if we’re skilled enough - and a little lucky - then it’s not unrealistic. We can’t promise that a treatment will be ready for clinical use in 10 years, but we hope to be at the stage where we’re testing in animal models or even on small groups of patients," says Per Borghammer.

“We can guarantee that no matter where we stand in 10 years, we’ll have conducted so many high-quality studies at all levels of Parkinson's research that we’ll know much more about the disease.”

Read the press release about the new centre

Clinical Professor, DMSc and PhD Per Borghammer
Aarhus University, Department of Clinical Medicine and
Aarhus University Hospital, Nuclear Medicine & PET-Centre
Telephone: +45 93 52 15 06
Email: borghammer@clin.au.dk

Dean Anne-Mette Hvas
Health, Aarhus University
Telephone: +45 87 15 20 07
Email: dean.health@au.dk