Welcome to the web site of the Laboratory of Motor and Sensory Systems. The work in our lab is directed primarily towards finding the initiating trigger, in other words the cause, of Parkinson's disease.
- Insert the description of PD from our first NHMRC grant here-
Parkinson's disease was first described in 1817, so for 194 years we have been looking into this disease but we still don't know what causes it. One of the reasons Parkinson's disease is so difficult to examine is because of the way it develops and the cells that it affects. Parkinson's disease is invariably diagnosed as a result of the onset of its characteristic motor symptoms, but by the time they first appear, you have already lost more than 50% of dopaminergic neurons from a region of your mid brain called the substantia nigra, which depletes up to 70% of dopamine from its target, a region of the brain called the striatum. This means that even if we had a way of halting the progression of the disease there would already be a substantial cell loss that couldn't be prevented. Therefore in addition to being able to halt the disease, you would ideally either need to be able to detect the diease much earlier, at a stage before any motor symptoms have appeared, or be able to replace the neurons that have degenerated.
Unfortunately, with out current level of understanding we have:
Rather than over coming each of these separate technical hurdles if we could identify the initiating trigger we would likely be able to detect these events much earlier as we would know what process we are looking for, and much more importantly we would also likely be able to interfere with the mechanism in some way and therefore halt the progression of the disease before there has been any neurodegeration. This is the goal of this lab.
Congratualtions to Steph for receiving her honours degree with first class Honours (a mark of over 80).
Comming Soon. In the coming weeks this is where we will be featuring our new concept store the Lab Shop. Here we will be featuring products such as micro art and Giant Microbes with more products coming online as we develop them.
