Dr Nathan Skene, a UK DRI researcher based at Imperial, is part of a team that has discovered that cells from the gut's nervous system are involved in Parkinson's disease, indicating that the disease may start there.
The team, led by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and the University of North Carolina in the USA, mapped out the cell types involved in a range of brain disorders. The findings are published in Nature Genetics and offer a roadmap for the development of new therapies to target neurological and psychiatric disorders.
The nervous system is composed of hundreds of different cell types with very different functions. It is vital to understand which cell types are affected in each disorder so as to understand their specific causes and, ultimately, develop new treatments.
In this study, researchers combined mouse gene expression studies with human genetics to systematically map the cell types underlying different brain disorders, including Parkinson's disease, a neurodegenerative disorder with cognitive and motor symptoms resulting from the loss of dopamine-producing cells in a specific region of the brain. They found that dopaminergic neurons were associated with Parkinson’s disease, and that enteric neurons also seem to play an important role in the disorder, supporting the hypothesis that Parkinson’s disease starts in the gut.
