nice pbt434 mention

http://www.otago.ac.nz/bhrc/news/otago058121.html

Visiting Parkinson’s researcher talks of hope in new drug trial

Wednesday, 30 October 2013

David Finkelstein 2013Last week, the Brain Health Research Centre welcomed Associate Professor David Finkelstein to the University of Otago. Dr Finkelstein is a Physiologist and Neurobiologist from the University of Melbourne, and is Head of the Florey Institute’s Parkinson’s disease laboratory. He spent his time here visiting BHRC scientists who are researching Parkinson’s disease, and gave a lunchtime seminar for our researchers.

Around 60,000 people in New Zealand currently have Parkinson’s disease. Dr Finkelstein’s seminar spoke of key factors of the disease that are still largely unknown, such as why twice as many males than females are affected, and why patients with the disease have such high levels of iron in the substantia nigra. He noted that in patients with Parkinson’s disease, iron entering the cell functions normally, but there appears to be dysfunction in iron leaving the cell that leads to accumulation. The build-up of iron in regions of the brain is known to be associated with Multiple System Atrophy and Alzheimer’s disease.

Dr Finkelstein and colleagues from the University of Melbourne are in the early stages of designing a new synthetic compound which they hope will form the next generation of therapies for Parkinson’s disease. Instead of treating the symptoms of the disease like other therapies, the drug known as PBT434 is designed to slow the progression. Human drug trials will begin next year.

We wish Dr Finkelstein and his colleagues all the best with the on-going trials of PBT434 for Parkinson’s disease.