Question: have you found any thing that might be able to cure this disease and how do yo test it?

Amy Reeve answered on 13 Jun 2011:

Hi

Good question 🙂 We haven’t found anything that can cure this disease yet. All the treatments that are given to people with Parkinson’s disease at the moment help them with their symptoms rather than cure them.

If we were to find a cure the first thing to do would be to see if it could make cultured cells better. Cultured cells are cells from humans or mice that we grow in the lab. because we grow them in the lab we can do various things to them and watch what happens. If our cure showed an affect on these cells then we would need to see if it could have an affect on a more complicated system like a mouse. We can make mice that have versions of human diseases. So we would then take our cure and treat these ‘disease mice’ with it. We would have to make sure that it made it into the brain and made their disease better without causing other problems!

If all this worked then we could start a clinical trial and start checking that it also cured humans. This is a very long process! But we can’t start finding cures until we know what makes people get this disease, that is why my research is so important. 🙂

thanks for your question 🙂