Landmark is a ground-breaking research programme aimed at accelerating the search for new treatments by applying cutting edge techniques to gain a new level of insight at cellular level into the changes Parkinson's causes in the brain. Principal investigator Professor Michael Johnson from Imperial College London explains the need across the global research community for the new high quality datasets his team will produce.

The project will use tissue samples from the Parkinson's UK Brain Bank, which was set up 22 years ago as a result of the remarkable foresight of Professor David Dexter, who is now the charity's Director of Research. He explains what it was like to see his vision come to fruition when Landmark was launched.

The three year research programme brings together a Parkinson's UK led consortium of four major pharmaceutical companies - GSK, Novartis, Roche, and UCB, plus Imperial College London, which was made possible with £4m of funding from the Gatsby charitable foundation.

The ground-breaking Predict-PD study has been gathering valuable information from thirteen thousand volunteers for 15 years, in an effort to find ways of identifying those people most at risk of developing Parkinson’s. We catch up with progress so far and find out how the project is continually growing and swapping information with other researchers as science moves ever closer towards the establishing the causes of the world’s fastest growing neurological disorder.

Dr Alastair Noyce, the Principal Investigator, is Professor of Neurology and Neuroepidemiology at the Queen Mary University of London.

If you are interested in volunteering to take part or just want to find out more, you can do so using this link:

https://predictpd.com/en

We are delighted to be focusing this month's episode on a research project that is actively recruiting patient participants all across the UK. The investigation, based at University College London, is looking at whether a medicine currently used to treat nausea and vomiting caused by some cancer treatments, could also help people with Parkinson's and Lewy Body Dementia who experience hallucinations.

Read Maria and Desmond's experience of taking part in the Top Hat trial:

Blog: https://www.parkinsons.org.uk/research/research-blog/ask-expert/research-reduce-hallucinations-desmond-and-marias-story

#Link to Take Part Hub recruitment page: https://www.parkinsons.org.uk/research/top-hat-trial-licensed-drug-parkinsons-hallucination-treatment

In this episode we're turning our attention to a long overlooked area of Parkinson's research; oral health. Despite its importance, little is known about how oral health issues affect quality of life for people living with the condition.

Jessie Tebbutt, NIHR Doctoral Clinical Fellow in Special Care Dentistry at the University of Sheffield, has been exploring the existing evidence on the oral health experiences of those with Parkinson's, and identifying key gaps in the current knowledge with a view to helping shape future research priorities.

In this episode we delve deep into science to hear about Professor Ian Ganley's ground-breaking research in the field of mitophagy, one of the body's self cleaning mechanisms that could play a key role in the development of Parkinson's. Not only is Professor Ganley making strides forward in what we know about the process, but his team have invented a prize winning new tool that has revolutionised the pace of progress in this immensely promising area of research worldwide.

Further reading:

https://www.ppu.mrc.ac.uk/research/principal-investigator/ian-ganley

Prof. Ganley's paper on the effects of LRRK2 mutations in mitophagy:

https://elifesciences.org/articles/67604

This month the NoSPRIG Parkinson’s research podcast is taking an unusual step away from science and into the arts. We’re joined by Dr Bethany Whiteside, Senior Lecturer at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, to find out about her research into specially adapted dance for people with Parkinson’s. She has identified a huge range of benefits for people taking part in the classes, which have movements specially tailored for those with the condition, and why the benefits differ from those of exercise on its own.

Pain is the subject of this month's episode, something that can affect people with Parkinson's in a huge variety of different ways. Dr Jenni Naisby, Assistant Professor of Physiotherapy at Northumbria University has been collecting a vast array or personal experiences of pain in her research looking into how the condition can affect pain processing at multiple levels of the central nervous system, and then find ways of classifying it by its mechanisms. By understanding how pain behaves she hopes to find better ways of treating it.

If you would like to read Jenni's latest research, which is funded by the Medical Research Foundation, you can find it below.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.3233/JPD-230227

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/08919887211023592