About 10 million people worldwide suffer from the brain disorder.
A team of Tel Aviv University researchers claims to have made progress in the path to treating Parkinson’s disease.
The team found that a variant of a protein, caused by a genetic mutation, enhances the spread of Parkinson’s pathology through nerve cells in the brain.
“Researchers have long tried to discover how the protein α-synuclein spreads through the brain, affecting one cell after another, and gradually destroying whole sections of the brain,” said TAU doctoral student Stav Cohen Adiv Mordechai in a press release on Tuesday. “Since α-synuclein needs to cross the cell membrane in order to spread, we focused on the protein TMEM16F, a regulator situated in the cell membrane, as a possible driver of this lethal process.”
