Research success could lead to treating disease

PARKINSON’S DISEASE researchers have stabilised toxic protein clusters associated with the condition for long enough to study them in detail for the first time.

The team examined clusters of protein molecules known as toxic oligomers, which disrupt the membranes of healthy brain cells.

It is thought the formation of these clusters plays a key part in Parkinson’s Disease, but until now they have proved difficult to examine as they are typically unstable.

Shortly after forming they either fall apart, or assemble into larger structures that are less damaging to individual cells.

In the new study, academics managed to stabilise oligomers for long enough to examine how they damage brain cell walls in unprecedented detail.

They identified a specific feature of the oligomer which allows it to latch on to the cell wall, and a “structural core”, which then drills through into the healthy cell.

Dr Giuliana Fusco, a postdoctoral researcher at St John’s College, Cambridge University, carried out much of the experimental work for the study.

She said: “Just having this information doesn’t mean that we can now go and make a drug, but obviously if we can understand why these clumps of proteins behave the way they do, we can make faster scientific progress towards treating Parkinson’s Disease.

“It means we can take a more rational approach to drug discovery.”

Toxic oligomers form at an early stage in the series of events that lead to Parkinson’s Disease, believed to begin when alpha synuclein proteins malfunction and begin to stick together.

Their emergence is said to be lethal to neuronal function in this context.